MIMO-Radar Waveform Design for Beampattern Using Particle-Swarm-Optimisation

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radars have many advantages over their phased-array counterparts: improved spatial resolution; better parametric identifiably and greater flexibility to acheive the desired transmit beampattern. The desired transmit beampatterns using MIMO-radar requires the waveforms to have arbitrary auto- and cross-correlations. To design such waveforms, generally a waveform covariance matrix, R, is synthesised first then the actual waveforms are designed. Synthesis of the covariance matrix, R, is a constrained optimisation problem, which requires R to be positive semidefinite and all of its diagonal elements to be equal. To simplify the first constraint the covariance matrix is synthesised indirectly from its square-root matrix U, while for the second constraint the elements of the m-th column of U are parameterised using the coordinates of the m-hypersphere. This implicitly fulfils both of the constraints and enables us to write the cost-function in closed form. Then the cost-function is optimised using a simple particle-swarm-optimisation (PSO) technique, which requires only the cost-function and can optimise any choice of norm cost-function. © 2012 IEEE.