Transmit–Receive Design for Airborne Radar With Nonuniform Pulse Repetition Intervals

This article aims to the joint design of transmit waveform and receive filter to enhance the clutter suppression capability for airborne radar with nonuniform pulse repetition interval (NUPRI). Specifically, a multipulse echo model with NUPRI incorporating a moving point-like target and signal-dependent clutter is first established. Then the 2-D range-Doppler plane is acquired by performing pulse compression and the windowed pulse Doppler processing on the echo. Further, the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of the interested area in the range-Doppler plane is formulated as a figure of merit to maximize along with constant modulus constraint on the waveform. To solve the resultant nonconvex problem, the sequential greedy optimization algorithm through alternately updating the transmit waveform and receive filter is proposed. Each iteration of the developed algorithm invokes coordinate descent framework and a Lagrangian-based algorithm to obtain the transmit waveform and receive filter, respectively. The analytical guarantee of the monotonic SINR improvement is proved. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is assessed through numerical simulations showing its capability to suppress signal-dependent clutter.