Designing FDA Radars Robust to Contaminated Shared Spectra

This article considers the problem of jointly designing the transmit waveforms and weights for a frequency diverse array (FDA) in a spectrally congested environment in which unintentional spectral interferences exist. Exploiting the properties of the interference signal induced by the processing of the multichannel mixing and low-pass filtering FDA receiver, the interference covariance matrix structure is derived. With this, the receive weights are formed using the minimum variance distortionless response method for interference cancellation. Owing to the fact that the resulting output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is a function of the transmit waveforms and weights, as well as due to the ever-greater competition for the finite available spectrum, a joint design scheme for the FDA transmit weights and the spectrally compatible waveforms is proposed to efficiently use the available spectrum while maintaining a sufficient receive SINR. The performance of the proposed technique is verified using numerical simulations in terms of the achievable SINR, spectral compatibility, as well as several aspects of the synthesized waveforms.