Transmit-Receive Beamforming for Distributed Phased-MIMO Radar System

Distributed phased Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (phased-MIMO) radar system consisting of separated subarrays possesses a high angle resolution but with sharing high sidelobes. This paper therefore focuses on the design of a virtual low-sidelobe beampattern in distributed phased-MIMO radar. An iterative framework with respect to subarray layout and receive weighting coefficients is proposed to minimize beampattern Peak Sidelobe Level (PSL) accounting for practical position constraints as well as the mainlobe level restriction. In each iteration, an efficient cyclic optimization algorithm based on the Coordinate Descent (CD) framework is developed to seek for the subarray layout through splitting high dimensional layout optimization problem into multiple one-dimensional optimization problems, and the SemiDefinite Relaxation (SDR) technique and rank one approximation are explored to design weighting coefficients. Numerical simulations are provided to assess the performance of the proposed algorithms in term of the achieved beampattern under different constraints and parameter settings.