Optimal waveform synthesis for adaptive radar

Target's echoes from different radar transmitted waveforms can provide different target signatures.. As for adaptive radar, the transmitted waveforms are adaptive to the operational environment to acquire optimal performance. This paper presents a waveform synthesis method for adaptive radar based on a cascade of the water-filling algorithm and iterative least squares (LS) approach. The optimal energy spectrum density (ESD) of the synthesized waveform is obtained by the water-filling algorithm based on maximizing the mutual information (MI) criterion; the echo can then extract the maximum amount of target information. The iterative LS approach is used to synthesize the complex-valued waveform in time domain while the modulus of synthesized waveform remains constant, which is helpful for maintaining the transmitter efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed optimal waveform synthesis method is competent for adaptive radar.