Robust Transmitter–Receiver Design in the Presence of Signal-Dependent Clutter

This paper considers the robust transmit-receive design for the detection of a moving point-like target embedded in signal-dependent clutter. In particular, we focus on the phase-only waveforms, sharing either the continuous or the finite alphabet phases and present iterative sequential optimization (ISO) algorithms to sequentially improve the worst-case signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) over clutter statistics. At each iteration, ISO involves multiple fractional programming problems that can be efficiently solved by either Dinkelbach's procedure with closed-form solutions for the continuous phases or the one-dimensional searching method for the discrete phases case. The ISO algorithms enjoy a polynomial complexity in terms of computational burdens. The effectiveness of ISO is confirmed experimentally in terms of the achieved SINR and computational efficiency. Our results also highlight that the design is robust against possible inaccuracies in the prior knowledge of the signal-dependent clutter and even velocity deceptive jamming.