Radar Space-Time Domino-Sparse-Pulse Feedback Beampattern Synthesis

Abstract

In radar space-time adaptive processing (STAP), the sliding window size of the filter is a crucial design parameter that significantly influences system performance. A smaller sliding window size while maintaining performance provides several benefits, particularly in terms of faster response and lower range migration probability on the receiver side. In this paper, we tackle the problem of space-time feedback beampattern synthesis (FBS), which reduces the sliding window size by reducing the required number of pulses while maintaining performance. This is achieved through the formulation of two novel models. Motivated by the domino effect, which creates a chain reaction of falling dominoes when the first one is knocked down, the first formulation introduces a novel domino-group-sparsity (DGS) scheme to achieve domino-sparse-pulses (DSP), and its adaptive version is also provided. While the second formulation minimizes the ratio of maximal sidelobe level to the minimal mainlobe level in the FBS to attain performance comparable to the former but with even fewer pulses. Especially, for the latter, we solve the resultant nested-fractional program by decoupling the fractions layer by layer. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.