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Inner Bounds on Performance of Radar and

Communications Co-Existence
Alex R. Chiriyath, Bryan Paul, Garry M. Jacyna, and Daniel W. Bliss, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractWe investigate methods of co-existence between

radar and communications systems. Each system typically considers the other system a source of interference. Consequently,
the traditional solution is to isolate the two systems spectrally or
spatially. By considering a cooperative radar and communications
signaling scheme, we derive achievable bounds on performance
for a receiver that observes communications and radar return in
the same frequency allocation. We assume the radar and communications operations to be a single joint system. Bounds on
performance of the joint system are measured in terms of data
information rate for communications and a novel radar estimation
information rate for the radar.
Index TermsPerformance bounds, radar-communications
co-existence.

I. INTRODUCTION

HERE is an ever increasing demand for spectrum and

given the limit on resources, communications and radar
systems are increasingly encouraged to share bandwidth. This
can cause inter-system interference that degrades the performance of both systems. The standard solution is to separate
(temporally, spatially or spectrally) the radar and communications systems. In this paper, we do not require this separation,
and we explore the fundamental radar and communications
co-existence performance bounds. An important contribution
that enables this exploration is the novel parameterization of
estimation information rate. The estimation information rate incorporates the insights of rate distortion theory but emphasizes
the symmetry with the communications bound. In this paper,
we rene and extend the performance bounds introduced in
[1], as well as the additional bounds discussed in [2]. We also
expand the results in [1] in greater detail. The two new inner
bounds on performance discussed in this paper are the isolated
sub-band inner bound and the optimal Fisher information inner
bound.

Manuscript received October 25, 2014; revised June 22, 2015; accepted
September 08, 2015. Date of publication September 28, 2015. The associate
editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Fauzia Ahmad. This work was sponsored in part by DARPA
under the SSPARC program . The views expressed are those of the author and
do not reect the ofcial policy or position of the Department of Defense or
the U.S. Government.
A. R. Chiriyath and D. W. Bliss are with the Bliss Laboratory of Information,
Signals, and Systems, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281 USA (e-mail:
achiriya@asu.edu).
B. Paul is with the Bliss Laboratory of Information, Signals, and Systems,
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281 USA, and also with the General
Dynamics Mission Systems, Scottsdale, AZ.
G. M. Jacyna is with The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA 22102 USA.
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TSP.2015.2483485

A. Background
The increasing demand for spectrum and the need for efcient
spectrum sharing techniques is highlighted in [3]. It is worth
noting that in our efforts presented here, we focus on radar estimation performance as opposed to radar detection which was
considered in [4][11]. To be more specic, in our work, we
have focused on the estimation of a dynamic target parameter,
time delay or target range, from the received target return and
the performance of the radar system is measured in terms of the
estimation rate.
The work presented in [4][7] investigated the application
of information theory to improve radar system performance. In
those works, the idea that signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) does not
measure information is introduced. Maximizing SNR does not,
in general, maximize information. By using information theory,
a new type of receiver, the a posteriori radar receiver, is developed that does not try and maximize output SNR but attempts to
maximize the quantity of information, given by the a posteriori
distribution of a target parameter.
In [8], waveform optimization for detection and target information extraction are considered. The radar waveform is designed so as to maximize the mutual information between the
target parameter of interest and the measurements obtained from
the receiver. It is shown that the maximization of mutual information improves the radar system performance measured in
terms of target classication ability or average measurement
error. However, performance of the optimized waveforms in
terms of target parameter estimation is not explicitly discussed.
In [12], information theory is utilized to develop a mutual information measure used for waveform and power spectrum design to jointly optimize the performance of radar and communications systems that overlap in frequency. Similarly, the work
presented in [11] also uses information theory to develop an expression for radar capacity (for radar systems performing target
detection only) which, in combination with traditional communications capacity, can be used to measure the total capacity of
a joint radar-communications network.
Current research has investigated the benets of using
methods similar to cooperative sensing to solve the problem
of radar and communications co-existence [13][18]. Radar
nodes that employ some form of cooperative sensing have an
improvement when compared to traditional nodes. In [13], it is
shown that co-existence between radar and communications is
feasible for radar nodes that utilize cooperative sensing with very
loose constraints on interference restrictions, such as low radar
transmit power. Another approach is employed in [14] wherein
the surveillance space of the radar system is divided into sectors
and priorities are assigned (using fuzzy logic) to all radar and
communications systems that want to transmit in each sector.

1053-587X 2015 IEEE. Translations and content mining are permitted for academic research only. Personal use is also permitted, but republication/
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CHIRIYATH et al.: INNER BOUNDS ON PERFORMANCE OF RADAR AND COMMUNICATIONS CO-EXISTENCE

Fig. 1. Joint radar-communications system.

Techniques such as interference mitigation [19], precoding

or spatial separation [20], waveform design [21][23] or waveform shaping [24][27] allow both radar and communications
to share the spectrum and co-exist. In [24], waveform shaping
is done by projecting radar waveforms onto the null space of
the interference channel matrix in an attempt to spatially minimize interference to the communications system from the radar
system.
Radar systems based on communications systems, where
radar systems use OFDM or DSSS signals as radar illumination signals, have also been considered [28][32]. Similarly,
communications systems using radar illumination signals
like linear frequency modulation (LFM) chirp waveforms as
modulation signals to transmit data have been developed [33].
Finally, signal sharing, a method in which both radar and
communications systems utilize the same waveform has also
been applied to the radar and communications co-existence
problem [34][36].
B. Contributions
In this paper, the joint radar-communications system consists
of an active, mono-static, pulsed radar and a single-user communications system. We assume that the radar system operates
without any maximum unambiguous range. We consider the
joint radar-communications receiver to be a radar transmitter/receiver that can act as a communications receiver. The joint receiver can simultaneously estimate the radar target parameters
from the radar return and decode a received communications
signal. While the node architecture can easily be generalized to
function as a communications relay by including a communications transmitter, this is not explicitly discussed in this paper.
We present a diagram of a jointly operating radar and communications system in Fig. 1.
In this paper, we develop a new approach for producing joint
radar-communications performance bounds. The principle contributions of this paper are as follows:
Develop novel joint receiver formulation analogous to
communications multiple access channel.
Develop radar estimation rate, a metric analogous to data
information rate.
Derive the isolated sub-band inner bound.
Derive the successive interference cancellation inner
bound.
Derive the communications water-lling inner bound.
Derive the optimal Fisher information inner bound.

465

This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we present

the channel and signal model for a joint radar-communications
system that is employed in this paper. We also introduce the
idea of an observed signal with a predicted radar return signal
suppressed. In Section III, we review the Cramr-Rao lower
bound on time-delay estimation. In Section IV, we develop the
radar estimation information rate. The estimation information
rate is the metric which we use to measure performance of the
radar system. In Section V, we present the multiple access communications performance bound as an analogy to the bounds
on performance for a joint radar-communications system. In
Section VI, we develop several inner bounds on the performance of the joint radar-communications system by considering
various scenarios and developing estimation and data rates for
the radar and communications systems respectively. Finally, in
Section VII, we draw conclusions from the results obtained in
this paper and discuss avenues for future research.
II. JOINT RADAR-COMMUNICATIONS CHANNEL MODEL
In this section, we consider the joint radar-communications
system complex baseband received signal,
, for a multipleaccess communications and radar return channel. We make the
following assumptions:
Target cross-section is a nuisance parameter.
Target cross-section is estimated well.
Targets are well separated.
Residual of unpredicted radar return is modeled well by a
Gaussian distribution before pulse compression.
Target range known, due to target tracking, up to some
Gaussian random process variation which is within one
over the bandwidth.
Portion of time during which radar return and communications signal overlap is only considered.
For the sake of simplicity in this introductory paper, we focus
only on range estimation, though many extensions could be
made to other estimation parameters. We present a table of signicant notation that is employed in this paper in Table I.
A. Radar Return Signal Model
Unless stated otherwise, we always assume that all signals are
in complex-baseband. While this may not seem pertinent now,
this becomes convenient later, when computing the information
rates (estimation and data) of both radar and communications
systems [37]. It is assumed that the received signal has been
passed through a brick-wall lter matched to the bandwidth of
interest, .
For targets, the observed complex baseband [37] radar return
in the presence of a communications signal and noise
is given by
(1)
where complex combined antenna, cross-section, and propagation gain for
target,
, is a parameter such that the radar
range equation for received power for the
target can be
written as
.
The zero-mean thermal noise
is drawn from a complex
Gaussian distribution with variance
. A

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the presence of the radar signal by using the predicted target

range to generate a predicted radar return and subtract it from
the received signal at the receiver.
For targets, the received signal at the communications receiver with the predicted radar return suppressed is given by

TABLE I
SURVEY OF NOTATION

(4)
Note that we have assumed here that the estimated amplitude
is equal to the actual amplitude. This approach is only useful
if the error in delay is smaller that
. For small uctuations
in delay, we can replace the difference between the actual and
predicted radar return waveforms with a derivative,
(5)
The signal observed by the communications receiver is then
given by

(6)
The interference plus noise from the communications systems
point of view is given by

reasonable time-delay estimator (particularly if targets are well

separated), assuming there is no communications interference,
is the correlation or matched lter estimator. As stated in
Section II, because we assume we are tracking the target, we
have some knowledge of the targets range (based upon prior
observations), up to some range uctuation in the return due
to an underlying target random process. This range uctuation
is interpreted as a uctuation in delay which is modeled by a
Gaussian distribution
. During the
observation, the
delay for the
target is given by,
(2)
is a prediction function which deThe function
pends on
, the pulse repetition interval, and a set of nonspecic system and target parameters, . The variance of the
range uctuation process is given by
(3)
B. Communications Signal With Predicted Radar Return
Suppressed
In order to improve the performance of the communications
system, we try to mitigate unnecessary interference caused by

(7)
(8)
where is frequency,
represents the frequency spectrum
of the unit variance radar illumination signal
, and
comes from employing Parsevals theorem to convert
into the frequency domain and then using the differentiation property of the Fourier transform [37].
is extracted
from bandwidth as follows
(9)
where the value is the scaling constant between and
times
that is dependent upon the shape of the radar waveforms power spectral density. For a at spectral shape,
.
Once the receiver has decoded the communications signal, it
can be removed from the observed waveform to obtain the original radar return signal free of any communications interference.
This technique is known as Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) [1]. We assume that SIC is employed by the joint

CHIRIYATH et al.: INNER BOUNDS ON PERFORMANCE OF RADAR AND COMMUNICATIONS CO-EXISTENCE

radar-communications receiver whenever there is any overlap

between the radar and communications signals.
III. CRAMR-RAO LOWER BOUND
TIME-DELAY ESTIMATION

the radar and bits per pulse repetition interval

radar estimation information rate is bounded by

467

, the
(13)

FOR

In this section, we develop the Cramr-Rao lower bound on

time-delay estimation on a SISO (single-input single-output)
channel with circularly symmetric Gaussian noise [38]. This is
a standard result that is presented here as exposition to connect
to the rest of the paper. The Cramr-Rao bound gives the best
performance (in terms of variance of estimation error) of an unbiased estimator.
For a single target with delay and combined radar crosssection, antenna and propagation gain , we assume that the
received signal of the time-delay estimator is given by

where
is the received signal entropy and
is the
estimation entropy.
The received signal entropy of the radar or the entropy of the
process uncertainty plus estimation uncertainty, assuming that
both are Gaussian, is given by [37], [39]
(14)
To nd the estimation entropy, we nd the delay estimation uncertainty for each target. Under the assumption of Gaussian estimation error, the resulting entropy of the error is given by

(10)
is the transmitted signal with power
whose frewhere
quency representation,
has full bandwidth ,
is the delayed version of the transmitted signal and,
is circularly symmetric Gaussian noise with zero mean and variance
.
Let
be the parameter to be estimated. From (10), we
see that
and has the following
probability density function,

(15)
target is
where the variance of delay estimation for the
given by (12).
Finally, after putting it all together, we see that the radar estimation information rate is given by

(11)
The Cramr-Rao lower bound for time delay estimation [38],
, is given by
(12)

(16)

where ISNR stands for integrated SNR and is given by

. By centering the spectrum at an appropriate point (by
choosing the origin of the spectrum), we get the RMS bandwidth
, given by (8).

It is worth noting, that by employing this estimation entropy

in the rate bound, it is assumed that the estimator achieves the
Cramr-Rao performance. If the error variance is larger, then
the rate bound is lowered.

IV. RADAR ESTIMATION INFORMATION RATE

V. MULTIPLE-ACCESS COMMUNICATIONS
PERFORMANCE BOUND

Here we develop a novel parameterization of the radar in

terms of information rate, the radar estimation rate. The metric
is analogous to data information rate for the communications
system. If radar illumination on a target can be viewed as the
target unwillingly communicating information on its parameters (range, cross-section etc.), the radar channel can be characterized by a uncooperative communications channel and the
estimation rate can be viewed as a mutual information between
the radar and the target. We construct this information rate by
considering the entropy of a random parameter being estimated
and the entropy of the estimation uncertainty of that parameter
[1]. As mentioned earlier, this estimation information rate employs the insights of rate distortion theory [39] and highlights
the symmetry with the communications information rate bound.
As an observation, if the targets are well separated, then each
target estimation can be considered an independent information
channel.
Motivated by the mutual information rate (or radar estimation
rate) in terms of estimation entropy, random process entropy of

We present the multiple-access communications system

performance bound [37], [39] as motivation to develop inner
bounds on the performance of a joint radar-communications
system [1]. In this scenario, the channel propagation gain for
the rst communications system is given by
and channel
propagation gain for the second communications system is
given by . The power of the rst communications transmitter
is denoted by
and the power of the second communications
transmitter is given by . Their corresponding rates are denoted
and . Assuming that the noise variance is given by
, the fundamental limits on rate are given by

(17)

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Fig. 3. Joint radar-communications system block diagram for SIC scenario.

Fig. 2. Pentagon containing Communications Multiple-Access Achievable

Rate Region.

Vertices are found by jointly solving two bounds to get,

(18)
The other vertex can be found by switching the subscripts 1 and
2 in (18). The region that satises these theoretical bounds is
depicted in Fig. 2.
The achievable rate region is obtained by taking the convex
hull [40] of the vertices 14. Because a radar signal is not derived from a countable dictionary, the fundamental assumption
of a communications signal is violated, and the bounds presented here can not be achieved by a joint radar-communications system. The result presented in this section can be extended for more than two communications systems. For different communications systems, the resultant achievable rate region is a -dimensional polytope [39].

radar pulse duration would cause the radar pulse duration to

exceed the pulse repetition interval of the radar system, i.e.,
, which would render the radar system unable to function correctly.
A. Isolated Sub-Band Inner Bound
In this section, we derive an inner bound by considering a
scenario in which we partition the total bandwidth into two
sub-bands, one for radar only and the other for communications. Each system functions without any interference in their
respective sub-band. This is the traditional solution to the joint
radar-communications co-existence problem.
The total bandwidth is split between the two sub-bands according to some such that,
The corresponding communications rate (for the communications only sub-band) is given by

(19)
and the corresponding radar estimation rate is given by

VI. PERFORMANCE BOUNDS OF A JOINT

RADAR-COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM
In this section, we derive inner bounds on the performance
of the joint radar-communications system. As mentioned earlier, performance is measured in data information rate for the
communications system and estimation information rate for the
radar system. To nd these inner bounds, we hypothesize an idealized receiver and determine the bounding rates. To simplify
the discussion, we consider only a single radar target with delay
and gain-propagation-cross-section product .
Additionally, for the sake of simplicity, we assume that
there is only a single communications link present. The results
derived in this section can be extended for more than the single
communications channel link. Similar to the multi-access
channel case described in Section V, this extension results in an
-dimensional polytope, for
communications users
and a single radar case.
Furthermore, for the derivations of the bounds presented in
this section, the radar pulse duration
is held constant. In
some scenarios, this implies that the time-bandwidth product of
the radar system is not constant. In [1], a case was made for
ensuring that the time-bandwidth product of the radar system
would be xed as constant which meant that the radar pulse duration would not be constant. This would cause the duty-factor
of the radar system to vary as well, which is not a desirable
feature for radar systems. Furthermore, in some cases, a varying

(20)
B. Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) Inner Bound
We consider a scenario in which the joint radar-communications system rst suppresses the predicted radar return and
then attempts to decode the communications signal. After the
receiver has decoded the communications signal, it can remove
the communications signal from the observed waveform. We
can then obtain the original radar return signal free of any communications interference. This sequential interference mitigation technique is called SIC. An achievable inner bound on joint
radar-communications system performance can be derived by
taking the convex hull of all achievable communications and estimation rate pairs, the SIC inner bound. The block diagram of
the joint radar-communications system considered in this scenario is shown in Fig. 3.
If
, it is as if the radar interference is not present
and the communications system can operate at a data rate determined by the isolated communications bound,

(21)

CHIRIYATH et al.: INNER BOUNDS ON PERFORMANCE OF RADAR AND COMMUNICATIONS CO-EXISTENCE

469

There are two effective channels,

(25)
for the communications only channel and

(26)
Fig. 4. Joint radar-communications system block diagram for communications
only and mixed use sub-bands.

If
is sufciently low for a given transmit power, then as
described above, the receiver can successfully decode the communications signal and remove it from the observed waveform,
leaving just the radar return. Thus, the radar parameters, such as
target range, can be estimated without corruption from any outside interference. This implies that from the communications
receivers perspective, it observes interference plus noise as described by (7), and the corresponding communications rate is
given by

for the mixed use channel. The communications power is split

between the two channels [37], [39],

(27)
if
; otherwise
.
where
The critical point (the transition between using one or both
channels for communications) occurs when

(28)
so both channels are used if

(22)

(29)

is
In this regime, the corresponding estimation rate bound
given by (16).
The vertices formed by (21), (22) and (16) correspond to the
points 2, 3 and 4 in Fig. 2, assuming that
is the estimation
rate, and
is the communications rate. An achievable rate lies
within the quadrilateral constructed by constructing the convex
hull between these points. This is the SIC inner bound.

If the communications-only channel is used exclusively for

. If both channels are emcommunications, then
ployed for communications then

C. Communications Water-Filling Inner Bound

and thus when (29) is satised,

In this section, we consider a scenario in which the total bandwidth is split into two sub-bands, one sub-band for communications only and the other sub-band for both radar and communications. It is not necessary that the sub-bands be of equal
bandwidth. We use a novel water-lling approach to distribute
the total communications power between the two sub-bands [1].
Water-lling optimizes the power and rate allocation between
multiple channels [37], [39]. In this scenario, the bandwidths
of the two channels need not be equal. This means that the
problem formulation in this scenario is not a standard formulation. Hence, we expect that the shape of the inner-bound derived
by employing water-lling to be non-intuitive. The mixed use
channel operates at the SIC rate vertex dened by (16) and (22).
The block diagram of the joint radar-communications system
considered in this scenario is shown in Fig. 4.
Given some that denes the bandwidth separation,
(23)
we optimize the power utilization, , between sub-bands,
(24)

(30)

(31)
The value of power fraction

is then given by

(32)
The resulting communications rate bound in the communications-only sub-band is given by
(33)

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The mixed use communications rate inner bound is given by

(34)
The corresponding radar estimation rate inner bound is then
given by
(35)

Fig. 5. Joint radar-communications system block diagram for radar only and
mixed use sub-bands.

D. Optimal Fisher Information Inner Bound

In this section, we construct another inner rate bound by considering an approach similar to the one utilized in the previous
section. We split the total bandwidth into two sub-bands and distribute the radar power (or power spectral density) between the
two sub-bands (instead of the communications power) in a way
that minimizes the Cramr-Rao lower bound (or maximizes the
Fisher information) on the variance of a time-delay estimator.
Hence, we have one channel that has radar only and the other
channel has both communications and radar. The block diagram
of the joint radar-communications system considered in this scenario is shown in Fig. 5. The bandwidth is split between the two
sub-bands according to some such that,
(36)
and
,
and we optimize the power spectral densities,
utilized by the radar only and mixed use sub-bands respectively,
to maximize the Fisher information, where

where
,
is the communications signal that is only present in the
is complex additive
mixed use channel,
white Gaussian noise (AWGN) in the radar only sub-band and
is complex AWGN in the mixed
is the variance of additive
use sub-band and
white Gaussian noise in a channel that was the sum of both sub
channels.
Using this return signal, we derive the Cramr-Rao lower
bound on the variance for joint time-delay estimation. Let
be the parameter to be estimated. From (40), we see that
and has the following
probability density function,
(41)
The corresponding log-likelihood function is given by

(42)

(37)
We have the following constraints on power and energy of the
radar system in the two sub-channels,

and the score function,

(38)
(39)
with bandwidth B, whose freNow, consider a radar signal
quency spectrum
is centered around
. We assume that
is spectrally at. We now partition the frequency spectrum into two portions,
and
with bandwidths
and
respectively, thereby creating two new sigand
which is used in transmissions in the
nals,
radar only sub-band and mixed use sub-band respectively. Because
is spectrally at, this implies that both
and
are spectrally at as well. This partitioning in the frequency domain also makes the two signals orthogonal in frequency.
Thus, after transmission, the radar receiver observes the following return signal,

is given by

(43)
where c.c. stands for complex conjugate term and
. Now, the Fisher information for this estimation
problem, , is given by

On simplication, we see that,

(44)

(40)

where the cross-terms in the product become 0 due to

and the independence of
and
. The factor of two

CHIRIYATH et al.: INNER BOUNDS ON PERFORMANCE OF RADAR AND COMMUNICATIONS CO-EXISTENCE

comes from the complex conjugate term. Using the fact that
and simplifying, we see that,

471

a time-delay estimator is obtained by plugging in (46) and (48)

into (45) and taking its derivative with respect to
, setting
.
is obtained
the resultant equation to 0 and solving for
in a similar way, except that (47) is used in (45) instead of (48).
and
are given by the following equations,

By multiplying the terms out, converting to frequency domain

and applying Parsevals Theorem, the time-shift and differentiation properties of the Fourier Transform and the orthogonality of
and
, for spectrally at
and
,
we get

(49)

(50)
where

The resultant estimation rate bound for the radar system in both
sub-channels is given by

to nally get

(51)
where

is the variance of the time-delay estimation given by

and is given by (45). The corresponding communications rate bound in the mixed use channel is

(45)
We consider
to be a free parameter. We select a value
by looking at the reduced Fisher information [37], [41]
of
for time-delay estimation derived from the Fisher information
matrix of joint amplitude and time-delay estimation. We set the
value of
such that the regular Fisher information for timedelay estimation, given by (45), and the reduced Fisher information for time delay estimation are equal. In general, the reduced
Fisher information is given by (58). As shown in Appendix A,
the resultant value for
is given by
(46)
From (38), we see that,
(47)
(48)
The value of the power spectral density utilized by the radar
, that maximizes the Fisher information for
only sub-band,

(52)
We expect the resulting inner bound to have end points given
by (16) and (22) (SIC vertex) when
and by (16) when
.
E. Examples
In Fig. 6, we display an example of the inner bounds on performance. The parameters used in the example are displayed
in Table II. It is assumed that the communications signal is received through an antenna sidelobe, so that the radar and communications receive gain are not identical. In general, the inner
bound is produced by the convex hull of all contributing inner
bounds.
For the optimal Fisher information bound, while optimizing
the distribution of radar power between the two sub-channels,
it was found that the power becomes complex for
and
. In order to get an inner-bound on rate over all values
of , the power in each sub-band has been set linearly for
and
such that the total power used by both
.
sub-channels at value is always the total radar power,

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Fig. 6. Data rate and estimation rate bounds for parameters in Table II.

TABLE II
PARAMETERS FOR EXAMPLE PERFORMANCE BOUND #1

multiple access channel was developed. We developed an

estimation information rate for time-delay estimation for a
radar system which is then used to evaluate performance.
Various inner bounds on performance such as the SIC inner
bound, the isolated sub-band inner bound, the communications
water-lling inner bound and the optimal Fisher information
inner bound were developed for a joint receiver. There are a
range of potentially interesting scenarios to which these bounds
may be applied. Given a set of parameters and constraints
on the radar and communications systems, we can use the
derived inner bounds to design appropriate joint systems. In the
case where we have full control over all parameters for both
systems, we can simply calculate the convex hull of all inner
bounds and, depending on the requirements of the system, we
can choose which region to operate in, thus also choosing the
algorithm that will be implemented by the system. In the case
where we have no control over some of a systems parameters,
we can design a joint system based on just the convex hull of
an appropriate subset of the derived inner bounds. This gives a
unique prole of all possible data and estimation rates and we
can then choose which region to operate in, depending on the
requirements of the system.

DERIVATION

In Fig. 6, we indicate in green, the bound on successive interference cancellation (SIC), presented in (22). The best case
system performance given SIC is at the vertex (at the intersection of the green and gray lines in Fig. 6), which is determined
by the joint solution of (22) and (16). The inner bound that linearly interpolates between this vertex and the radar-free communications bound in (21) is indicated by the gray dashed line.
The water-lling bound is indicated by the blue line. The waterlling bound is not guaranteed to be convex. The water-lling
bound is not guaranteed to be greater than the linearly interpolated bound. The isolated sub-band inner bound is indicated by
the brown line and the optimal Fisher information bound is indicated by the black line.
In the example, we see that the water-lling bound exceeds
the linearly interpolated bound and all other inner bounds. We
also see that the optimal Fisher information bound is always
lower than the water-lling bound and the linearly interpolated
SIC bound. The optimal Fisher information bound can either exceed the isolated sub-band bound or be lower than the isolated
sub-band bound depending on the value of used. As mentioned in Section VI-C, the shape of the water-lling curve is
non-intuitive. Finally, we see that the end points of the optimal
Fisher bound are as expected.

APPENDIX A
OF REDUCED FISHER INFORMATION FOR
TIME-DELAY ESTIMATION

In this section, we rst derive the Fisher information cross

terms for joint amplitude and time-delay estimation and nd the
value of the free parameter
that sets these cross-terms to 0.
We then show that by setting the cross-terms to 0, the reduced
Fisher information for time-delay estimation is the same as the
Fisher information for time-delay estimation, given by (45).
We consider the same scenario as described in Section VI-D.
The total bandwidth is split into two sub-bands and the radar
power (or power spectral density) is distributed between the two
sub-bands. The bandwidth and radar power (power spectral densities) are split between the two sub-bands according to some .
Now, consider a radar signal
with bandwidth , whose
frequency spectrum
is at and centered around
.
and
are the spectrally orthogonal sub-band
signals with bandwidths
and
respectively.
Thus, the joint receiver observes the following return signal
(53)
where
,
is the communications signal that is present in the mixed use
channel and
is circularly symmetric Gaussian noise with
zero mean and variance
.
Let

be the parameters to be estimated. From (53),

we see that
the following score function,

and has
is given by

VII. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we provided a novel approach for producing
joint radar-communications performance bounds. A unique
joint receiver signal model similar to the communications

(54)

CHIRIYATH et al.: INNER BOUNDS ON PERFORMANCE OF RADAR AND COMMUNICATIONS CO-EXISTENCE

where c.c. stands for the complex conjugate term and

. Now, the Fisher Information Matrix for this
estimation problem, , is given by

473

reduced Fisher Information [37], [41] for time-delay estimation

is

(58)

REFERENCES

We now simplify the cross terms of the Fisher information

matrix. Starting with
, we see that on simplication,

By multiplying the terms out, converting to frequency domain

and applying Parsevals Theorem and the time-shift and differentiation properties of the Fourier Transform, for spectrally at
(or
and
), we get
(55)
Applying the denition of

and simplifying, we get

(56)
Similarly, using the same properties as mentioned above, on
simplifying the other cross term in the Fisher information matrix we see that

In order to nd the value of

that sets the Fisher information matrix cross-terms
and
to 0, we set
and solve for
. The resultant value for
is
(57)
This means that the Fisher information cross terms are be 0
whenever the value of
is given by (57). In this case, the

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Alex R. Chiriyath received his BSEE degree (Cum

Laude) in electrical engineering from the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2012 and his M.S.
degree in electrical engineering from Arizona State
University in 2014. He is currently pursuing his
Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Arizona
State University.

Bryan Paul received the B.S. degree (Highest

Honors) in electrical engineering from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010, and the
M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Arizona
State University in 2014. He is currently pursuing
the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from
Arizona State University.
From 2002 to 2008, he was enlisted in the Illinois
Air National guard completing multiple tours of duty
in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. From 2010 to 2012, he was
with Validus Technologies, Peoria, Illinois, working in the area of embedded
software and digital signal processing. He is currently with General Dynamics
Mission Systems (legacy General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems)
in Scottsdale, Arizona, working in the area of digital signal processing and
systems. His current research interests include signal processing, information
theory, radar, and communications.
Bryan has received numerous military decorations, including the Humanitarian Service Medal. He is a co-inventor of one awarded U.S. patent.

Garry M. Jacyna received the B.S. degree in

physics in 1973 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees
in mathematics in 1974 and 1977, respectively, all
from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
Prior to joining MITRE in 1987, he was employed
at UNISYS, Reston, VA, performing EW system
studies including wideband detection, robust localization, direction nding, and signal parameter
identication and characterization. He was with
Planning Systems Incorporated, McLean, from 1977
to 1984 as a senior systems analyst responsible
for the analysis and review of advanced sonar equipment. He is currently
a MITRE fellow of the MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA. His specialties
include analytical-based performance studies for DoD and DHS programs as
well as extensive research in the areas of sonar system performance modeling,
articial neural networks, wavelet detection and estimation, higher order spectral analysis, adaptive beamforming, nonlinear control theory, and nonlinear
signal and noise modeling. He has designed complexity-based analysis tools
for Marine Corps agent-based simulation models and distributed detection,
classication, and tracking algorithms for netted sensor systems. He was also
an Adjunct Assistant Professor of electrical engineering at Catholic University,
Washington, DC, teaching in the areas of communication theory, stochastic
processes, sonar signal processing, detection and estimation theory, and neural
networks.

Daniel W. Bliss (F15) received his BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University
in 1989 and his M.S. in Physics and Ph.D. and
from the University of California at San Diego in
1995 and 1997, respectively. Employed by General
Dynamics from 1989 to 1993, he designed rocket
avionics and performed magnetic eld calculations
and optimization for high-energy particle-accelerator superconducting magnets. His doctoral
work (19931997) was in the area of high-energy
particle physics. He was a senior member of the
technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory from 1997 to 2012. He is currently
an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy
Engineering at Arizona State University. His current research topics include
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications, MIMO
radar, cognitive radios, radio network performance, geolocation, and statistical
signal processing for anticipatory physiological analytics. Dan has been the
principal investigator on numerous programs with applications to radio, radar,
and medical monitoring. He has made signicant contributions to robust multiple-antenna communications including theory, patents, and the development
of advanced prototypes. He is responsible for some of the foundational MIMO
radar literature.