Joint Design of the Transmit and Receive Beamforming in MIMO Radar Systems

In this paper, we investigate the problem of joint design of the transmit and receive beamforming weight vectors for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems in the presence of signal-dependent interference, which is distinct from its existing counterparts focusing on joint design of the temporal codes of transmit waveforms and spatial-temporal receive filter. The design problem is formulated as output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) maximization subject to a similarity constraint on the transmit beamforming weight, such that a good transmit beampattern can be guaranteed. Due to the existence of signal dependence, the resultant problem is NP-hard, and therefore, an iterative scheme is devised. Specifically, in each iteration, the receive beamforming is optimized with the minimum variance distortion-less response method, then the transmit beamforming is obtained via the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique. It is proved that the proposed SDR-based algorithm is able to produce a rank-one solution. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.