Spatial- and Range- ISLR Trade-off in MIMO Radar via Waveform Correlation Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel waveform design method for MIMO radar that optimizes the trade-off between spatial and range ISLRs using a Pareto optimization approach, enhancing radar imaging performance.

Contribution

It presents a flexible, constraint-aware waveform design framework for 4D imaging MIMO radars based on coordinate descent and Pareto optimization.

Findings

Significantly improved ISLR trade-off demonstrated in simulations

Flexible design applicable to 4D imaging MIMO radars

Effective bi-objective optimization under practical constraints

Abstract

This paper aims to design a set of transmitting waveforms in cognitive colocated Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) radar systems considering the simultaneous minimization of spatial- and the range- Integrated Sidelobe Level Ratio (ISLR). The design problem is formulated as a bi-objective Pareto optimization under practical constraints on the waveforms, namely total transmit power, peak-to-average-power ratio (PAR), constant modulus, and discrete phase alphabet. A Coordinate Descent (CD) based approach is proposed, in which at every single variable update of the algorithm we obtain the solution of the uni-variable optimization problems. The novelty of the paper comes from deriving a flexible waveform design problem applicable for 4D imaging MIMO radars which is optimized directly over the different constraint sets. The simultaneous optimization leads to a trade-off between the two ISLRs and the simulation results illustrate significantly improved trade-off offered by the proposed methodologies.