Joint design of the transmit and receive weights for coherent FDA radar

Abstract

Frequency diverse array (FDA) differs from conventional array techniques in that it imposes an additional frequency offset (FO) across the array elements. The use of FO provides the FDA with the controllable degree of freedom in range dimension, offering preferable performance in joint angle and range localization, range-ambiguous clutter suppression, and low probability of intercept, as compared to its phased-array or multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) counterparts. In particular, the FO of the coherent FDA is much smaller than the bandwidth of the baseband waveform, capable of obtaining higher transmit gain and output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). In this paper, we investigate the problem of joint design of the transmit and receive weights for coherent FDA radar systems. The design problem is formulated as the maximization of the ratio of the power in the desired two-dimensional range-angle space to the power in the entire area, subject to an energy constraint that limits the emitted energy of each transmit antenna and a similarity constraint such that a good transmit beampattern can be guaranteed. Due to the resultant problem is NP-hard, therefore, a sequential optimization method based on semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique is developed. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.