Spatial- and Range- ISLR Trade-Off in MIMO Radar Via Waveform Correlation Optimization

This paper aims to design a set of transmit waveforms in cognitive colocated Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) radar systems considering the simultaneous minimization of spatial- and the range- Integrated Sidelobe Level Ratio (ISLR). The design problem is formulated as a bi-objective Pareto optimization under practical constraints on the waveforms, namely total transmit power, peak-to-average-power ratio (PAR), constant modulus, and discrete phase alphabet. A Coordinate Descent (CD) based approach, called UNIQUE, is proposed in which at every single variable update of the algorithm we obtain the solution of the uni-variable optimization problems. The novelty of the paper comes from deriving a flexible waveform design problem applicable for the emerging 4D imaging MIMO radars with application to automotive radar systems. The simultaneous optimization leads to a trade-off between the two ISLRs and the simulation results illustrate significantly improved trade-off offered by the proposed methodologies.