New Figures of Merit for Pulse Compression Sequences

Abstract

Two usual criteria of goodness of pulse compression sequences are discrimination and merit factor. Here new measures of goodness called ‘figures of merit’ are proposed. Justification for them is offered in terms of the properties the measures of goodness should have and the notions analogous to robust signal processing. The return signal is assigned to equivalence classes based on the notion of Hamming distance and the proposed figures of merit are defined in terms of appropriate crosscorrelation properties averaged over the neighbourhood of the transmitted sequence. These figures of merit are tabulated for some binary and ternary sequences. They indicate how the performance of a pulse compression sequence deteriorates as the medium gets noisier and bring out that the best sequence may be different at different noise levels. Adaptive, diversity-combinatorial and robust schemes of pulse compression arise as a result.

Indexing terms:

• Pulse compression
• Signal processing
• Binary and ternary sequences