Novel Orthogonal Random Phase-Coded Pulsed Radar for Automotive Application

Abstract

In contrast to remote sensing radar, automotive radar focuses on the detection of short-range targets in the 0–1000 m range. Conventional automotive pulsed radar usually uses a monostatic antenna and it requires high peak power for the transmission of the short duration pulses to reliably detect targets at close range with a high resolution. Unfortunately, it is difficult and expensive to generate high-powered pulses on the nanosecond scale. Meanwhile, the existing automotive radars suffer from bottlenecks, i.e., spatial resolution, sidelobe levels, and Inter-Sensor Interference (ISI). To overcome the above challenges, a bistatic antenna to transmit and receive large time-bandwidth product waveforms is firstly proposed in this paper. Secondly, high spatial resolution is implemented using a Digital Beam Forming (DBF) transmitter and the high range resolution is achieved by using the pulse compression technique. Additionally, the radial velocity of the target is calculated by applying pulse Doppler processing. Finally, to deal with the sidelobe effect of impulse response function of point target and the interference arising from neighboring radars, novel Orthogonal Random Phase-Coded (ORPC) radar signals are presented. Using these ORPC signals, the impulse response function of the radar can achieve a peak sidelobe ratio of –45 dB without any loss in the signal-to-noise ratio. Most importantly, interference can be significantly reduced by using the proposed signals. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed radar.