AoI-Aware Waveform Design for Cooperative Joint Radar-Communications Systems With Online Prediction of Radar Target Property

In this paper, we propose a novel age-of-information (AoI)-aware waveform design scheme for the cooperative joint radar-communications (JRC) system, called AoI-aware Online Prediction (A-OnP) scheme. To be specific, we optimize the power allocation of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal. We aim to maximize the radar mutual information (RMI) with considering the communication data rate (CDR) and AoI performance. Specifically, we design a cognitive operating framework for the JRC system, with a particular emphasis on the closed-loop signal processing for online prediction of the radar target scattering coefficient (TSC). Then, considering the obtained TSC prediction result and corresponding communication performance requirement, we optimize the power allocation of the transmit waveform and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) threshold of the communication users. Accordingly, we propose a constraints-splitting coordinate descent (CS-CD) method to solve the formulated non-convex problem by strategically splitting the sum-constraints and assign a quota to each channel, where the allocation criteria is automatically decided during iteration. Simulation results demonstrate that, the cooperative radar-centric communication-constrained (RC-CC) waveform outperforms the separately optimized radar-optimal plus communication-optimal (RO-CO) waveform. Additionally, the A-OnP scheme can increase RMI while meeting the communication CDR and AoI requirements.