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A novel orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar is proposed in this paper in a scenario of coexisting with a communication system. For the purpose of avoiding interference to communication while maintaining MIMO radar's capabilities, such as measuring signal's direction of departure (DOD), a collocated antenna array is divided into several overlapped subarrays. Mutually OFDM waveforms exploiting an orthogonal space-time block code are transmitted through these subarrays to obtain waveform diversity, which can be separated at the radar receiver. A MUSIC-like DOD estimation algorithm and the Cramer–Rao bound of DOD are proposed for overlapped subarrays’ configuration in order to evaluate performance of the beamforming strategy. The beamformer is designed using an optimization technique at cost of maximizing the input SNR of radar while keeping communication rate constant. Due to nonconvexity of the optimization problem, a two-step optimization algorithm is proposed. Simulation experiments validate theoretical analysis of the proposed precoding radar. Experiments also show robustness of the precoding scheme and the ability of balancing the input SNR of radar and the communication rate.

In the traditional model of monostatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the flying platform should have a uniform linear trajectory. In practice, the flight path of the SAR platform, which is highly nonlinear or curvy caused by 3-D velocity and acceleration, cannot be used in the traditional model. In this paper, a geometrical model of the monostatic SAR with general configurations is graphically illustrated by vector notation. Moreover, the gradient method is utilized to point out the effects of the motion parameters, namely, velocity vector and acceleration vector, on total bandwidth and image resolution. Based on the accurate model, a general frequency-domain algorithm, with the incorporations of pre- and postprocessing, is proposed to focus the raw data. Applicability is studied through theoretical analysis and numerical experiments. All these general analyses can be applied to different realizations of monostatic SAR mode, including spotlight SAR, sliding spotlight SAR, and Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans (TOPS) SAR.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is usually performed along a straight path. In practice, variations from the ideal caused by maneuvers with acceleration are inevitable. The main problem is the complex signal processing, particularly in the highly squinted spotlight mode. In this paper, acceleration model is analyzed in more details. Impacts are obtained how the acceleration influences the Doppler parameters and space-variant terms, including the SAR resolution and azimuth bandwidth. According to the special signal properties of the acceleration case, an approximation of the range history is made to avoid using the method of series reversion (MSR) to obtain an accurate spectrum. Based on the high-accurate spectrum, a spotlight algorithm with a modified two-step approach is given. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the modified algorithm.