Constrained Radar Waveform Design for Range Profiling

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified optimization framework for designing constrained radar waveforms that enhance range profiling performance by maximizing mutual information or minimizing estimation error, considering practical waveform constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel minorization-maximization based approach for constrained waveform design in radar range profiling, addressing multiple practical constraints.

Findings

Proposed algorithms outperform existing methods in numerical tests.

Designed waveforms improve target response estimation accuracy.

Framework effectively handles multiple practical waveform constraints.

Abstract

Range profiling refers to the measurement of target response along the radar slant range. It plays an important role in automatic target recognition. In this paper, we consider the design of transmit waveform to improve the range profiling performance of radar systems. Two design metrics are adopted for the waveform optimization problem: one is to maximize the mutual information between the received signal and the target impulse response (TIR); the other is to minimize the minimum mean-square error for estimating the TIR. In addition, practical constraints on the waveforms are considered, including an energy constraint, a peak-to-average-power-ratio constraint, and a spectral constraint. Based on minorization-maximization, we propose a unified optimization framework to tackle the constrained waveform design problem. Numerical examples show the superiority of the waveforms synthesized by the proposed algorithms.