Spectrally Compatible Waveform Design for MIMO Radar in the Presence of Multiple Targets

This paper investigates the problem of the spectrally compatible waveform design for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar in the presence of multiple targets and signal-dependent interference. Unlike the existing approaches to designing the waveform for a single target via output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) maximization, a new method is proposed to deal with a more general problem, i.e., designing a spectrally compatible waveform for multiple targets, by minimizing the waveform energy of the overlayed space-frequency bands under constraints of waveform similarity and individual SINR requirements. Due to the existence of signal dependence, the formulated optimization problem is NP-hard. Toward this end, an iterative algorithm is developed. Concretely, at each iteration, the receive filter is first obtained with the aid of the minimum variance distortionless response method, then the transmit waveform is optimized by employing the dual ascent method. Both the convergence and asymptotic optimality of this algorithm are discussed. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.