Worst-case jamming signal design and avoidance for MIMO radars

Abstract

We optimize the jamming signal for disrupting the operation of a MIMO radar system in order to understand the threat jamming poses to such systems. The jamming signal optimization is formulated as a minimax problem minimizing the maximum SINR that the receivers can achieve, resulting in a semidefinite program for a Toeplitz jamming covariance matrix or a second-order cone program for a circulant approximation. In the simplest case of optimizing the average SINR of a single receiver, a waterfilling-type solution is obtained. Numerical studies suggest that distributed radar systems with waveform agility and mismatched filtering capabilities are resilient against jamming.