Designing Sequences With Minimized Mean Sidelobe Level for Cognitive Radars

In this paper, a set of sequences is developed with a minimized mean sidelobe level (MSL). The problem is formulated for cognitive radars using the l
₁
-norm, where the target cognition determines which sidelobes should be suppressed. The cognitive radar configuration requires fast waveform regeneration in each cognition cycle. In this light, the computational burden of the algorithms developed here is revealed to be situated on the singular value decomposition (SVD) operation. The randomization method is adopted to speed up the proposed algorithms. The obtained fast generation of sequences with the desired autocorrelation is key to its utilization in cognitive radars. We also consider two practically important cases and accommodate the proposed approach to them: unimodular and finite-alphabet sequences. The superiority of the developed algorithms is confirmed both in suppression level and speed through extensive numerical simulations.