Authors
Bingyan Lu and Nick Laneman
Abstract
The radio frequency spectrum is an increasingly scarce resource, emphasizing the importance of efficient utilization. Although spectrum efficiency has been extensively studied in communication systems, its definition and evaluation in radar systems remain inadequate. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a novel approach for defining spectrum efficiency in radar systems based upon the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB). Analogous to the Shannon capacity theorem in communication systems, the CRLB serves as a fundamental limit, enabling the determination of the idealized reference system. Spectrum efficiency for a radar system is then defined by comparing its performance to that of the idealized reference system. We illustrate the proposed approach with the example of a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar system for target localization through a combination of analysis and numerical evaluation.