Evaluation of Minimum SDR Requirements for Transmitter Modules in CC-OFDM MIMO Radar Applications

The increasing demand for high-resolution radar systems has driven the development of advanced radar technologies. This paper focuses on the concept of CC-OFDM MIMO radars, which leverage the high spectral efficiency of OFDM and the spatial diversity of MIMO to achieve superior beamforming performance, range resolution, and target detection. Despite these promising capabilities, there is a significant gap in the literature regarding the practical hardware implementation of CC-OFDM MIMO radars. This study aims to address this gap by providing a simple formulation to evaluate the minimum required SDR specifications and the influence of input parameters that affect these specifications using an evaluation approach based on the number of operations and RFLOPS used. This paper presents the evaluation results in the context of surveillance radar applications addressed in a previous paper, where the RFLOPS requirement can reach up to 4.03 Mega operations, which is equivalent to approximately four thousand TFLOPS. The paper also includes an analysis and comparison with existing SDR examples, as well as the impact of the input parameters on the number of RFLOPS, which will be useful for providing considerations when designing and implementing this concept in other radar applications.