Robust MIMO Beamforming for Cellular and Radar Coexistence

In this letter, we consider the coexistence and spectrum sharing between downlink multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) communication and an MIMO radar. For a given performance requirement of the downlink communication system, we design the transmit beamforming such that the detection probability of the radar is maximized. While the original optimization problem is non-convex, we exploit the monotonically increasing relationship of the detection probability with the non-centrality parameter of the resulting probability distribution to obtain a convex lower-bound optimization. The proposed beamformer is designed to be robust to imperfect channel state information (CSI). Simulation results verify that the proposed approach facilitates the coexistence between radar and communication links, and illustrates a scalable tradeoff between the two systems’ performance.