Joint design of the transmit and receive beamforming for multi-mission MIMO radar

Abstract

This paper jointly designs the transmit and receive beamforming vectors for a multi-mission multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. The radar searches for potential targets within a prescribed region while tracking multiple targets with known locations. To improve the performance of search mission and track mission, we aim to maximize the transmit energy in the prescribed region and ensure that the received signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of each target is not less than a preset threshold. To tackle the resulting NP-hard problem, we introduce an iterative algorithm based on the sequential optimization procedure. In each iteration, the receive beamforming vectors are first updated by resolving the unconstrained maximization problems. Then, a fractional quadratic constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) is developed for updating the transmit beamforming vector and is solved with semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique. Numerical simulations verify the convergence performance of the proposed algorithm. The ability of the radar to simultaneously implement the required two tasks is also demonstrated through the synthesized transmit and receive beampatterns.