A Unified Orthogonal Communication Framework for Adaptive Waveform Design of Missile Defense Radars

This proposal addresses the feasibility of developing adaptive waveform modulation schemes for missile defense radars via the orthogonal communication concept. With the increasing prevalence of electronic countermeasures, innovative waveforms and advanced signal processing techniques are needed for improving sensing performance as well as reducing vulnerability to jamming for missile defense radars. Therefore, the goal of this study is to develop adaptive illumination waveform algorithms for enhancing target detection, discrimination, and tracking as well as increasing resilience to jamming and other countermeasures. Motivated from the analogy drawn between the cellular wireless communication systems and the general multi-static radar systems, Phase I work will focus on developing signal processing schemes of adaptive illumination waveforms for enhancing radar performances based on our prior development in interference avoidance via orthogonal communication for wireless communications. We shall develop unified system architecture of the adaptive radar waveform design for various scenarios including multi-static radars and multiple targets. To illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, we shall compare the performance of the developed system with the conventional linear frequency modulated waveforms and other state-of-art waveform adaptation algorithms. A software-defined radio evaluation platform will also be built to demonstrate the performance improvement of our proposed adaptive modulation design.