MIMO-DFRC Hybrid Beamforming Design via Transmit Pattern Optimization

Compared with the fully-digital transmit beamforming architecture which deploys a radio frequency (RF) chain per antenna, the hybrid beamforming (HBF) architecture can reduce both high cost and high power consumption encountered by the former. In this work, we focus on the transmit pattern-centric HBF design for multiple-input multiple-output dual-functional radar communication (MIMO-DFRC) systems. More specifically, the hybrid analog and digital beamformers, which adopt a fully connected structure, are jointly designed with the digital receive beamformers of communication users, by designing the transmit pattern with the maximal ratio of minimum mainlobe level (MML) to peak sidelobe level (PSL), subject to a transmit power budget and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirements for users. To deal with the resulted nonconvex problem, a computationally efficient algorithm is developed under the framework of consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (CADMM), by deriving the solution of each subproblem. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiorities of our design by comparing with existing methods.