Joint Deceptive Jammer and Clutter Suppression Via 3D-ANM With EPC-MIMO Radar

The performance of the traditional Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) methods will deteriorate in the presence of both mainlobe deceptive jammers and clutter. In order to mitigate the clutter and deceptive jammers simultaneously, a Three-Dimensional Atomic Norm Minimization (3D-ANM) STAP method based on subspace projection is proposed with an Element Pulse Coding-Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (EPC-MIMO) radar. At the modeling stage, by coding both the transmit elements and slow-time pulses, the echoes corresponding to different range ambiguity regions can be discriminated via equivalent spatial beampattern directions. In this regard, the target, mainlobe deceptive jammers, and range-ambiguous clutter can be distinguished in transmit-receive- Doppler domain by exploiting the distribution differences. Subsequently, the STAP method is utilized to mitigate clutter and deceptive jammers jointly. In specific, the subspace projection technique is adopted to ensure the comprehensiveness of subsequent covariance matrices estimation. Moreover, two 3D-ANM problems are formulated to recover the jammer-plus-range-ambiguous clutter covariance and range-unambiguous clutter covariance matrices, respectively. Particularly, in order to reduce the computational complexity, the constructed 3D-ANM problems are solved via Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). In addition, theoretical derivations and proofs on the properties of the developed methods are given. A series of simulations verify the efficacy of the proposed 3D-ANM STAP algorithm in mitigating deceptive jammers and clutter simultaneously.