Co-prime comb signals for active sonar

This paper presents an active sonar waveform that achieves range-Doppler performance similar to a uniform frequency comb, but uses far fewer tones to do so. The trade-off for this reduction in occupied bandwidth is a larger bandwidth extent. Co-prime comb signals consist of tones at non-uniformly spaced frequencies according to a 2-level nested co-prime array structure. Specialized non-matched filter processing enables recovery of an ambiguity surface similar to that of a uniform comb, but using fewer tonal components. This reduction in occupied bandwidth offers potential benefits such as sharing, interference avoidance, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) improvements in both peakand total-power-limited scenarios.