Wideband MIMO radar beampattern shaping with space-frequency nulling

Abstract This paper deals with the design of wideband Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar waveform to approximate a desired beampattern and achieve prescribed space-frequency nulling in a space-frequency region of interest. An objective function considering a specific weighted sum of the beampattern matching error and the space-frequency stopband energy is presented to minimize under the Constant Modulus (CM) requirement on the probing waveform. To handle the resulting non-convex (also NP-hard in general) optimization problem, a fast iterative algorithm sharing a polynomial computational complexity is proposed. In each iteration, it involves a novel Iterative Optimization Algorithm (IOA) to cope with a non-convex quadratic programming problem ensuring that the objective value monotonically decreases and converges to a finite value, and the corresponding solution fulfills first-order optimality conditions. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm compared with the available methods.