Design and performances evaluation of new Costas-based radar waveforms with pulse coding diversity

Costas codes are a variant of pulse compression waveforms, largely studied for their attractive time-frequency properties. Their 'thumbtack-like' ambiguity function (AF) makes them highly suitable for delay and Doppler estimation, in radar and sonar applications. However, this behaviour depends heavily on the length of the code: the improvement in delay-Doppler resolutions and AF sidelobes level needs an increase in the size of the code. In this study, designs that allow good performance without increasing the size of the code are proposed. They are based on a modification of Costas codes by widening frequency separation between hops and replacing rectangular pulses by other waveforms. This will lead to a removal of autocorrelation function grating lobes that normally appear when frequency separation is increased. The originality of the work lies in the proposal of diversified pulse waveforms, such as phase codes, Slepian sequences, and other Costas codes, to encode main Costas pulses. A performance comparison of the proposed approaches is supplied. Such waveforms could also be of interest for applications where waveform diversity is desired