Multi-target Position and Velocity Estimation Using OFDM Communication Signals

In this paper, we consider a passive radar system that estimates the positions and velocities of multiple moving targets by using OFDM signals transmitted by a totally un-coordinated and un-synchronizated illuminator and multiple receivers. It is assumed that data demodulation is performed separately based on the direct-path signal, and the error-prone estimated data symbols are made available to the passive radar receivers, which estimate the positions and velocities of the targets in two stages. First, we formulate a problem of joint estimation of the delay-Doppler of reflectors and the demodulation errors, by exploiting two types of sparsities of the system, namely, the numbers of reflectors (i.e., targets and clutters) and demodulation errors are both small. This problem is non-convex and a conjugate gradient descent method is proposed to solve it. Then in the second stage we determine the positions and velocities of targets based on the estimated delay-Doppler in the first stage. And two methods are proposed: the first is based on numerically solving a set of nonlinear equations, while the second is based on the back propagation neural network, which is more efficient. The performance of the proposed passive OFDM radar receiver algorithm is evaluated through extensive simulations.