Phase response constrained symbol‐level waveform design for dual‐functional radar‐communication systems

Abstract

AbstractIn this letter, a novel algorithm is proposed to design symbol‐level waveform for dual‐functional radar‐communication (DFRC) systems with low range sidelobe. Different from current schemes design waveform at the block level, a phase response constraint is introduced at the symbol level to provide an additional degree of freedom to decrease the range sidelobe in the pulse compression procedure, which is highly desired in radar systems. In particular, the phase response at the target direction is constrained to be similar to the given reference phase, and the matching error between the designed beampattern and the desired one is minimized subject to the constant modulus constraint. Furthermore, to guarantee the quality of service for communication, constructive interference is exploited at the symbol level for each communication user. An alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm is also proposed to solve the resulting nonconvex optimization problem with tractable subproblems solved sufficiently by the manifold optimization and standard quadratic problem. Numerical simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.