OFDM-NOMA combined with LFM signal for W-band communication and radar detection simultaneously

In this Letter, an effective integrated waveform generation method where an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) communication signal combined with a linear frequency modulation (LFM) radar signal is proposed and experimentally demonstrated in a W-band communication and radar detection system. The proposed method can generate communication and radar signals simultaneously. In addition, multiple user communication and multi-target radar detection can be realized. Furthermore, for the OFDM-NOMA signal, discrete Fourier transform (DFT) precoding is used to keep the optimal power ratio consistent on different subcarriers, thus, the communication performance can be effectively improved. The experimental results show that the distance estimation error is 1.2 cm for radar signals. Meanwhile, after transmission over 0.8-m free space, the total aggregate rate for two users with the OFDM-NOMA signal is 3.125 Gb/s under the bit error rate of 8.5 × 10^-4.