SNR-Dependent Mismatched Filtering for Bistatic OFDM Ranging

Ying Zhang, Fan Liu, Yifeng Xiong, Jie Yang, Xinyi Wang, Shi Jin

This paper investigates the ranging performance of a bistatic integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system employing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), in which an ISAC transmitter emits a communication waveform carrying random data symbols, and a separate receiver performs ranging by correlating the received signal with a locally demodulated symbol sequence. Owing to inevitable demodulation errors, the ranging processor operates under mismatched filtering rather than ideal matched filtering, resulting in a delay-domain correlation response whose sidelobe structure explicitly depends on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Focusing on frequency-flat fading channels, we derive closed-form expressions for the expected sidelobe level (ESL) and the average mainlobe level of the resulting mismatched ranging response for BPSK, QPSK, and general square QAM constellations. The analysis quantitatively characterizes how SNR-driven symbol decision errors reshape the delay-domain sidelobe behavior, thereby providing analytical insight into the SNR-dependent scaling behavior of ranging performance in bistatic OFDM-based ISAC systems. Simulation results validate the theoretical derivations and confirm the accuracy of the proposed analysis.