Adaptive OFDM radar for target detection in multipath scenarios

We develop methods for detecting a moving target in the presence of multipath reflections, which exist, for example, in urban environments. We take advantage of the multipath propagation that increases the spatial diversity of the radar system and provides different Doppler shifts over different paths. We employ a broadband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal to increase the frequency diversity of the system as different scattering centers of a target resonate variably at different frequencies. To overcome the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem of the conventional OFDM, we also use constant-envelope OFDM (CE-OFDM) signaling scheme. First, we consider a simple scenario in which the radar receives only a finite number of specularly reflected multipath signals. We develop parametric measurement models, for both the OFDM and CE-OFDM signaling methods, under the generalized multivariate analysis of variance (GMANOVA) framework and employ the generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) tests to decide about the presence of a target in a particular range cell. Then, we propose an algorithm to optimally design the parameters of the OFDM transmitting waveform for the next coherent processing interval. In addition, we extend our models to study the aspects of temporal correlations in the measurement noise. We provide a few numerical examples to illustrate the performance characteristics of the proposed detectors and demonstrate the achieved performance improvement due to adaptive OFDM waveform design.