Physical Layer Security in Joint Radar and Communication Systems

There is increasing demand for radar and communication systems that share the hardware platform as well as the frequency band, as this not only avoids spectrum congestion, but also benefits both sensing and signaling operations via the full cooperation between both functionalities. Nevertheless, the success of spectrum and hardware sharing between radar and communication systems critically depends on high -quality joint radar and communication designs. Recent communication and radar spectrum sharing (CRSS) may raise security and privacy concerns. By sharing the spectrum with communication systems, the military radar may unintentionally give away vital information to commercial users, or even worse, to the adversary eavesdroppers. To this end, physical layer security must be considered in the CRSS scenarios, where a possible method is that radar actively transmits artificial noise to the adversary target to impede eavesdropping, while formulating desired beampatterns. This project aims to design a secure joint radar and communication system which could achieve a right balance between radar detection, estimation performance, and the achievable secrecy rate. We aim to leverage signal processing and optimization techniques to achieve the project objectives