Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2021
In this paper, an efficient dual function radar-communication system is proposed to improve the system's resource utilization. In this work, we considered a scenario where the location of the communication receiver is known prior but the radar target is moving and its location is changing with time. Therefore, we proposed a closed-loop design that allows an adaptive selection of appropriate information embedding strategies during tracking operations. We used two strategies that utilize the amplitudes and/or phases of the transmitted radar waveforms toward the communication direction according to the position of the communication receiver during each scan. Hence, during each radar illumination, the system carries out a target-tracking task and simultaneously maintains the communication symbols transmission toward the intended communication direction. The simulation results verify the effective performance of the proposed approach in terms of target detection and tracking performance and angular bit error rate (BER). Furthermore, the proposed amplitude phase-shift keying signaling strategy can transmit different communication symbols to different users located within the sidelobe region and also provides a significant improvement in data rate transmission and BER performance compared with the existing sidelobe-based communication strategies.