Improved design of unimodular waveforms for MIMO radar

This paper proposes a novel method of unimodular transmitting waveforms design for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar to strengthen the detection performance in the presence of clutter and white Gaussian noise. An improved iterative algorithm is put forward to maximize the signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio (SCNR) under the constant modulus constraint. During iterations, the optimization of unimodular waveforms with filters fixed is a nonconvex fractional quadratically constrained quadratic program problem, which is NP-hard and not able to be solved in polynomial time. An algorithm based on semidefinite programming relaxation combined with bisection and Gaussian randomization is introduced to provide the high-quality suboptimal solutions with a polynomial time computational complexity. The analysis on the approximation bound is given to prove the tightness of the semidefinite programming relaxation and so the correctness of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results show that the improved method is efficient in designing unimodular waveforms for MIMO radar to achieve a better SCNR performance.