Joint Design of Transmit Waveforms and Receive Filters for MIMO-STAP Radar With Two Sequential Constraints

We consider the joint design of transmit waveform and receive filter in multiple-input–multiple-output space–time adaptive processing (MIMO-STAP) radar for detecting slow-moving targets in the presence of interference (clutter and jamming). The joint design with two waveform sequence constraints is addressed due to the potential advantages, such as the better clutter suppression, weak target detection, and spectral compatibility. We formulate an optimization model relying on the maximization of signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) under correlation properties (CP) and constant modulus (CM) constraints. Due to CP and CM constraints, the resulting optimization problem is nonconvex. To solve this problem, we propose an alternating direction penalty method frame, which can turn the problem into several subproblems. Among them, the subproblem, which is constrained by sets of quadratic functions is reduced into a quadratic programming problem. Except the CP constraint, another important constraint, namely, spectral constraint, is taken into account in the waveform design, which can be solved by adopting a similar way like the proposed algorithm. Several numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method, which show better SINR for joint design with good correlation. Besides, it presents efficiently convergence ability as well as low computational complexity for joint design with spectral compatibility.