Optimum radar signal synthesis is one of finding a signal (the complex envelope of the radar transmitter waveform), whose ambiguity function has a magnitude closest, in the mean square sense, to a nonnegative function G(t,f), of two variables, which function is chosen keeping in mind the given radar environment. Sussman (1962) has sought a solution to this problem in a finite-dimensional subspace of the space of square-integrable functions, defined over the time interval −∞ < t < ∞. In this paper, however, the optimum signal is sought in the class L2(−T, T) of all square-integrable functions vanishing outside a finite interval, thereby removing the finite-dimensional restriction imposed by Sussman, in his work, on the class of admissible signals. This optimization problem is shown to lead to an eigenvalue problem for a nonlinear integral operator on L2(−T, T). Next, an iteration scheme is presented whereby this nonlinear operator is approximated by a sequence of linear operators. These linear operators are recursively constructed utilizing a sequence of functions Gsn (n = 0, 1, 2, …), obtained at each stage by assigning to the G-function the phase of the ambiguity function corresponding to an eigenfunction sn associated with the largest eigenvalue of the linear operator at the previous stage. It is shown that any cluster point of the sequence of solutions of the linear eigenvalue problems thus generated furnishes at least a suboptimal solution to the basic problem of the synthesis of radar signals.
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