Joint Transceiver Design for Dual-Functional Full-Duplex Relay Aided Radar-Communication Systems

Driven by the demand for massive and accurate sensing data to achieve wireless network intelligence under a limited available spectrum, the coexistence between radar and communication systems has attracted public attention. In this paper, we investigate a novel dual-functional full-duplex relay aided radar-communication system where the phased-array radar is employed at the amplify-and-forward (AF) relay. A joint transceiver design is proposed to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among all detection directions at the radar receiver under communication quality-of-service and total energy constraints. The formulated optimization problem is particularly challenging due to the highly nonconvex objective function and constraints. Based on the problem structure, we equivalently decompose it into the radar-energy and relay-energy minimization problems under SINR requirements. To solve the radar-energy minimization problem, we propose a low-complexity algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers to optimize the radar transmit power and receiver. The relay-energy minimization problem can be simplified into an equivalent quadratic programming problem by introducing an insightful unitary matrix. Then, the closed-form expression for the AF relay beamforming matrix can be derived, which is jointly determined by the channel condition of relay communication and the detection direction of the radar. After that, we introduce the overall transceiver design algorithm to the original problem and discuss its optimality and computational complexity. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms other benchmark algorithms.