Adaptive MCPC radar waveform design with improved wideband ambiguity function

Multicarrier Phase-Coded (MCPC) signals have been recently introduced to radar systems as a kind of wideband signal. In this paper we study the wideband ambiguity function (WAF) of multicarrier phase-coded signals. Based on the fact that scattering characteristics of target varies with frequency, we propose an approach which adaptively changes the transmitted frequency weights to improve radar´s WAF. The adaptive waveform also yields better auto-correlation function. Using optimization procedure, frequency weights are adaptively changed such that the volume of the corresponding WAF best approximates the volume of a desired ambiguity function. Simulation results show that proper selection of carrier number and symbol length can yield better properties of WAF.