Optimal Waveform Design for Dual-functional MIMO Radar-Communication Systems

This paper considers the waveform design for dual-functional multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) radar-communication systems. Two optimization-based novel waveform designs are proposed. The aim of the first waveform design is to minimize the downlink multi-user interference (MUI) energy by exploiting the remaining degrees of freedom (DoFs) while always guaranteeing the radar performance to be optimal. The second waveform design is a trade-off optimization between radar and communication performances by allowing a tolerable mismatch between the designed and the desired radar beampatterns. Albeit non-convexity of both problems, efficient algorithms are devised to obtain globally optimal solutions, which can be used for simultaneous target detection and downlink communications. Numerical results show that the communication performance could be significantly improved by tolerating a slight radar performance loss and therefore a favorable balance between communication and radar performances is achievable.