Joint range and velocity estimation for integration of radar and communication based on multi‐symbol OFDM radar pulses

Integration of radar and communication (IRC) is conducive to improving hardware resource utilization and spectrum utilization. This paper proposes a joint range and velocity estimation method for IRC based on multi‐symbol orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) radar pulses. A two‐step parameters estimation method is applied, where estimating the signal parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT) and weighted subspace fitting (WSF) perform rough and fine estimations. We first build a receiving model for integrated signal based on element‐wise division. The ESPRIT method is then adopted based on the double Vandermonde structure array manifold for a rough estimation. It has relatively high estimation error but low computational complexity. The WSF method based on alternating projection (AP) algorithm is introduced to make the estimation more precise and reduce its error. It uses the estimation results in the first step and reduces the overall computational cost. Simulation results show that the proposed method reduces the computational complexity while improving the estimation accuracy compared with the WSF method.