Joint design of transmit beamspace and reduced‐dimension receiver filter for MIMO radar STAP

Abstract

Abstract In this article, the problem of the transmit beamspace (TB) matrix design in multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) radar is considered. To reduce the computational burden and to focus the energy within optimal spatial sector, a joint design method of the TB matrix and a reduced‐dimension space‐time adaptive processing (STAP) filter is proposed based on the maximum signal‐to‐clutter‐plus‐noise ratio (SCNR). Firstly, the signal model of the reduced‐dimension STAP for TB‐based MIMO radar is established. Then, using the maximum SCNR as the design metric, the joint design model of the TB matrix and the reduced‐dimension STAP filter is presented. Furthermore, the cyclic optimisation method is exploited to deal with the non‐convex joint design problem with the energy constraint. Finally, simulation experiments demonstrate the joint design method of the TB matrix and the STAP filter not only has better output SCNR performance but also owns lower computational burden when compared with the other existing methods.

Keywords

• filtering theory
• optimisation
• radar clutter
• radar signal processing
• space‐time adaptive processing
• MIMO radar