Optimal Monopulse Beamforming for Side-Looking Airborne Radars

The synthesis of the optimal excitations of the sum and the difference patterns in planar active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs) for side-looking airborne monopulse radar systems is addressed. Under the assumption that each array element is equipped with a single transmit receive module (TRM), which is shared among all patterns, the complex (amplitude and phase) TRM coefficients are optimized with a customized convex programming procedure to yield a sum beam with maximum directivity and difference beams with maximum slope along the boresight direction as well as asymmetric sidelobes envelope for noise suppression from half-space. Representative results from a synthesized AESA devoted to a real airborne application are illustrated and discussed to give some insights to the interested readers on the features and the potentialities of the proposed synthesis approach.