Communication-Aware Waveform Design for MIMO Radar With Good Transmit Beampattern

Designing the radar waveform, which ensures spectral compatibility with the communication systems, is known to be challenging. In addition to having the desirable transmitter efficiency, it is also anticipated to share the good pulse compression property of the reference waveform. In this paper, we investigate the problem of waveform design for multiple-input multiple-output radar with good transmit beampattern under certain practical constraints (e.g., peak to average power ratio and similarity constraints) in coexistence with communication systems. The waveform is designed by minimizing a weighted summation of the beampattern integrated sidelobe-to-mainlobe ratio and waveform energy over the space-frequency bands. Since the resulting problem is NP-hard, two approximated primal-dual algorithms based on the alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm are proposed. Concretely, the proposed algorithms update the primal variable by minimizing the linearized and quadratic approximations of the augmented Lagrangian function of the original problem, respectively. The closed-form solution of each primal variable is provided. Moreover, both the convergence and computational complexities of these two algorithms are discussed. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.