Software-Defined Digital Radar: Flexible Design and Field Verification With PMCW Waveform

Radar sensing is increasingly deployed across diverse Internet of Things (IoT) domains, from intelligent transportation and industrial automation to human-centric monitoring. With the growing density of radars in these environments, radar-to-radar interference has emerged as a critical challenge, particularly for conventional systems that lack waveform distinctiveness. This trend underscores the need for digital radars capable of source identification and interference resilience. In this work, we present a software-defined radio (SDR) platform for digital radar, implemented on a Xilinx Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC) device that supports multi-gigahertz sampling. The proposed architecture provides flexible waveform generation and processing entirely in software, thereby accommodating arbitrary digital sequences, including but not limited to phase-modulated continuous wave (PMCW). While this paper focuses on PMCW radar as a representative case study, the system can be readily extended to alternative digital waveforms for broader sensing and communication scenarios. We validate the prototype through extensive indoor and outdoor experiments, demonstrating accurate range and velocity estimation under realistic conditions. The results confirm that SDR-based digital radar offers a practical and reconfigurable approach for future IoT-oriented radar deployments, paving the way toward interference-resilient and software-defined sensing platforms.