Robust Beamforming Design for Dual-Function Radar-Communication System

In this paper, we investigate the problem of robust beamforming for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) system, when there exist radar look direction mismatch and communication channel state information (CSI) error. To address these system imperfections, a region-of-interest (ROI) rather than a specific angle is considered for radar sensing, and the communication CSI is assumed to be available with a bounded unknown error. With these considerations, we design a robust dual-function beamformer through optimizing the radar sensing performance in terms of the energy radiated towards the ROI, while guaranteeing the communication quality-of-service (QoS) measured by the per-user signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) as required. For this robust design, a max-min optimization problem is formulated and a semidefinite programming (SDP) reformulation based on the S-procedure is presented. The popular semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique is employed to solve the resulting non-convex problem, and the tightness of SDR is discussed. Further, we propose to incorporate an extra constraint of main beam control into the problem to achieve a flat magnitude response of the beampattern over the ROI. In addition, it is shown that the proposed approach is straightforwardly applicable to the scenario of multiple targets. Numerical examples are carried out to show the tightness, and demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed MIMO-DFRC beamforming approach.