Photonic-assisted generation of joint radar and communication signals with immunity to power fading

Abstract

In this paper, a photonic-assisted generation of joint radar and communication signals with immunity to power fading is proposed based on a dual-polarization binary phase-shift keying (DP-BPSK) modulator. Two dual-drive Mach–Zehnder modulators (DD-MZMs) named DD-MZM1 and DD-MZM2 are respectively located on the upper and lower arms of the DP-BPSK modulator. In DD-MZM1, an intermediate frequency communication signal is single sideband (SSB) modulated on the optical carrier. At one radio frequency (RF) port of DD-MZM2, a split parabolic waveform signal is phase-modulated on the optical carrier to generate SSB radar signal, and the other RF port is used to phase modulate local oscillator signal. By simply adjusting a polarization controller, radar or communication signal can be respectively generated at different frequency band after balanced photoelectric conversion. Experiments are carried out to verify the feasibility of the scheme. Radar signals with bandwidths of 500 MHz and 1 GHz are generated. The error vector magnitude of the generated 16-QAM signal with a baud rate of 100 Msym/s is 5.42%. The frequency tunability and the immunity to power fading are also verified. The proposed method has a simple and compact structure and meets the requirement of long-distance transmission, which has potential applications in emerging intelligence scenarios.