On the Practical Use and Experimentation of LTE Signals for Radar-Communications

This paper examines practical implications of using traditional 4G long term evolution (4G LTE) downlink communications for monostatic radar purposes. A fast algorithm from the literature is examined and shown to suffer performance penalties due to deviations of the 4G signal from the ideal textbook orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) formulation. In particular, an integrated range sidelobe penalty is noted due to the nulling of the center subcarrier and spurious Doppler responses are shown due to the non-uniform cyclic prefix (CP). Finally, experimental results are shown which indicate an increased noise floor due to degraded cancellation of higher-order modulated data symbols.