Hybrid Beamforming for Multi-Carrier Dual-Function Radar-Communication System

Abstract

This paper investigates a hybrid beamforming design for dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) systems. Comparing with fully digital beamforming, much less radio frequency (RF) chains are needed and hence, both hardware cost and energy consumption can be reduced. The hybrid transmit/receive beamformers are designed by maximizing the sum-rate under constraints of power as well as similarity between the designed beamformer and the reference one that has good beampattern property. Particularly, both single-user and multi-user scenarios are addressed by introducing different hybrid beamforming designs. For the single-user case, we devise an alternating optimization method under the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework. For the multi-user scenario, we introduce a two-stage procedure based on weighted mean-square error minimization (WMMSE). Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.