A Numerical Comparison of Chirp Sequence versus OFDM Radar Waveforms

The radar waveforms OFDM and chirp sequence are numerically compared in terms of receiver operating characteristic, accuracy in range and Doppler estimation and necessary signal bandwidth. By means of Monte Carlo simulations, fairly equal performace is shown, which supports a previous analytical result by the authors, which revealed that both signals yield the same baseband signal under narrowband assumption and negligible range-doppler-coupling in the chirp sequence waveform. However, as unambiguous range and Doppler get large, chirp sequence needs prohibitively more bandwidth than OFDM.