Joint Subcarrier and Power Allocation for Integrated OFDM Waveform in RadCom Systems

In the integrated radar and communication (RadCom) systems, the integrated orthogonal frequency division modulation (OFDM) waveform with interleaved subcarriers (IS) can simultaneously perform radar and communication functions. However, the autocorrelation function (ACF) of the integrated waveform may have high sidelobe level with high probability due to the discontinuous spectrum for radar. To solve this problem, in this letter, a joint subcarrier and power allocation method is proposed to minimize the peak-to-sidelobe ratio (PSLR) while meeting the requirement of the communication data rate (CDR) and maintaining a certain range resolution. The formulated optimization problem is nonconvex, and we propose the cyclic minimization algorithm to obtain the subcarrier and power allocation. Finally, several numerical results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.