Spatial Modulation for Joint Radar-Communications Systems: Design, Analysis, and Hardware Prototype

Dual-function radar-communications (DFRC) systems implement radar and communication functionalities on a single platform. Jointly designing these subsystems can lead to substantial gains in performance as well size, cost, power consumption. In this paper, we propose DFRC system, which utilizes generalized spatial modulation (GSM) realize coexisting communications waveforms. Our proposed GSM-based scheme, referred based communication-radar (SpaCoR) allocates antenna elements among the transmitted message, thus achieving increased rates by embedding additional data bits selection. We formulate resulting signal models, present dedicated processing scheme. To evaluate performance, characterize statistical properties of transmit beam pattern. Then, hardware prototype demonstrating feasibility results show that GSM system achieves improved compared techniques utilizing fixed allocations operating at same rate. For subsystem, our experiments agility induced transmission improves angular resolution reduces sidelobe level pattern using allocations.