Method of processing communication signals for use in radar sensing, and apparatus configured to execute the method

A method of processing communication signals for use in radar sensing comprising:

• a) receiving a reflected communication signal, wherein the reflected received communication signal is a reflection of a transmitted communication signal, and storing the received communication signal in a receiver buffer,
• b) retrieving a copy of the corresponding transmitted communication signal, representing a reference signal, from a reference buffer,
• c) segmenting the reference signal into a first segment-number of first-length segments and segmenting the reference signal into a second segment-number of second-length segments, and arrange the first-length and the second-length-segments in respective first and second reference signal matrices,
• d) segmenting the received communication signal into a first segment-number of first-length segments and segmenting the received communication signal into a second segment-number of second-length segments, and arranging the first-length and the second-length segments in respective first and second received communication signal matrices,
• e) evaluating first and second segmented ambiguity functions based on the first and second received communication signal matrices and the corresponding first and second reference signal matrices, respectively,
• f) obtaining, from the first and second segmented ambiguity functions, first and second range estimates and first and second velocity estimates, for one or more targets,
• g) on any obtained first and second range and/or first and second velocity estimate, determining if ghost signals are present in the estimates and, in the positive case, resolving the ghost signals or assigning an ambiguity order to the estimates,
• h) outputting the obtained or resolved range and velocity estimates, or the estimates and the assigned ambiguity order,
• i) iteratively repeating steps e) to h) until a termination criterion is met wherein, in the second and each further iteration a respective remaining left-most non-zero column of the first and second received communication signal matrices are removed, and a right-most zero-column is appended.