Colocated MIMO Radar Waveform Design for Transmit Beampattern Formation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel MIMO radar waveform design method that minimizes side-lobe levels for improved beam patterns, providing analytical solutions and practical algorithms for complex constraints.

Contribution

It derives a closed-form optimal solution for the side-lobe minimization problem and proposes a semidefinite relaxation approach for constrained beamwidth design.

Findings

Analytical optimal solution extends Rayleigh quotient minimization.

Semidefinite programming effectively approximates solutions for complex constraints.

Design impacts are analyzed with varying transmitters and waveforms.

Abstract

In this paper, colocated MIMO radar waveform design is considered by minimizing the integrated side-lobe level to obtain beam patterns with lower side-lobe levels than competing methods. First, a quadratic programming problem is formulated to design beam patterns by using the criteria for a minimal integrated side-lobe level. A theorem is derived that provides a closed-form analytical optimal solution that appears to be an extension of the Rayleigh quotient minimization for a possibly singular matrix in quadratic form. Such singularities are shown to occur in the problem of interest, but proofs for the optimum solution in these singular matrix cases could not be found in the literature. Next, an additional constraint is added to obtain beam patterns with desired 3 dB beamwidths, resulting in a nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic program which is NP-hard. A semidefinite program and a Gaussian randomized semidefinite relaxation are used to determine feasible solutions arbitrarily close to the solution to the original problem. Theoretical and numerical analyses illustrate the impacts of changing the number of transmitters and orthogonal waveforms employed in the designs. Numerical comparisons are conducted to evaluate the proposed design approaches.