MIMO radar waveform design method via low sidelobe beampattern modification

In the design of the multiple-input multiple-output(MIMO) radar waveform, decreasing transmit beampattern sidelobes could reduce the energy of clutters and false targets from sidelobes and increase the received signal to noise ratio (SNR) so as to improve the angle estimation property. Motivated by this idea, a transmit waveform design method based on low sidelobe beampattern modification is proposed for MIMO radar. First, the transmit waveform cross-correlation matrix can be obtained by the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique. Then the essence of our method is to establish an optimization modification model to reduce the beampattern sidelobe by changing the non-diagonal elements of the waveform cross-correlation matrix. Finally, the corresponding transmit beamforming weight matrix is obtained by this modified matrix, and the ESPRIT algorithm is used for the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. Meanwhile, the feasibility of our method is demonstrated. Simulation results show the superiorities of our method in sidelobe suppression, DOA estimation accuracy and angle resolution.