Constrained waveform design for dual-functional MIMO radar-Communication system

Abstract This paper designs waveform for dual-functional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar-communication system. Reducing multi-user interference (MUI) energy can improve the sum-rate of communication, while a proper transmit beampattern can improve the target detection performance of radar. Considering the above facts, a weighted objective function is developed to design dual-functional waveform, which suppresses the MUI energy and makes the synthesized transmit beampattern approach to our desire. Besides, similarity and constant modulus constraints are enforced to ensure the pulse compression performance and unimodular property of designed waveform. The resulted optimization problem is quartic and non-convex. To tackle it, we develop an iterative algorithm based on the framework of block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM). The proposed algorithm, monotonic and convergent, requires for low computational complexity, which benefits from the careful derivation to the upper-bound of objective function. Numerical simulations first analyze the convergence performance of the proposed algorithm and then comprehensively evaluate the performance of the designed waveform in terms of communication sum-rate, transmit beampattern and pulse compression performance.