Robust multiple‐input multiple‐output radar waveform design in the presence of clutter

Abstract

The work presented here addresses the problem of robust waveform design for collocated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar in the presence of clutter. Robust design is needed due to the fact that MIMO radar waveform design is often sensitive to estimation errors in the initial parameter estimates, which tries to systematically ease this sensitivity by including a parameter estimation error model into the optimisation issue. Following the min–max approach, the robust MIMO radar waveform design is considered in this study to improve the worst-case estimation accuracy in the presence of clutter on the basis of the Cramer–Rao bound. To tackle the resultant NP-hard problem, a new diagonal loading based iterative method is developed to design the waveform covariance matrix for improving the worst-case accuracy, each step in which can be formulated into a convex optimisation issue, and hence can be solved efficiently. An optimal solution to the initial issue can be obtained via the least squares fitting of the solution acquired by the iterative algorithm. Numerical simulations show the efficiency of the proposed method.