Joint Antenna Selection and Transmit Beamforming for Dual-Function Radar-Communication Systems

Dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) design is a promising approach for solving the challenging spectrum congestion problem. This paper considers joint antenna selection and digital beamforming design for a DFRC system that serves multiple multicast communication groups and, meanwhile, performs sensing. The dual-function transmit design is cast as maximizing the minimum target illumination power in multiple target directions by jointly selecting the antennas and designing the beamformers subject to a lower bound on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for the communication users and an upper bound on the clutter power at each clutter scatterer. The resulting optimization formulation is a mixed integer programming problem that is solved with a penalized sequential convex relaxation scheme along with semidefinite relaxation (SDR). Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed DFRC scheme and the associated algorithm.