Radar phase-modulated waveform design for extended target detection

Extended target detection performance can be enhanced by using phase-modulated waveform designs in band-limited radar systems. Unlike waveforms designed for the total energy constraint, phase-modulated waveforms can fully exploit the transmit power in the pulse duration, which is more suitable for practical radar systems. An alternating iterative algorithm was developed to optimize the phase-modulated baseband waveform by maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver filter output. The output SNR increases continuously with the number of iterations and the algorithm is guaranteed to converge. Simulations validate the effectiveness of this approach. The waveforms designed by this method outperform other commonly used waveforms for extended target detection.