Colocated MIMO radar waveform optimization with receive beamforming

Abstract Transmit waveform diversity brings some advantages to colocated Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radars. Current waveform design techniques do not sufficiently exploit the degrees of freedom from the receive end. In this paper, we devise waveform optimization criteria with the receive end beamforming operation. With mutual correlation sidelobes suppressed at the receive end, some degrees of freedom can be released for a lower global sidelobe level. For transmit beampatterns with unequal gains, two Peak Sidelobe Level (PSL) measures are discussed, one for identical range compression PSL and the other for the same distance to the noise level. Numerical results are given for beampatterns with mono-peak, two peaks with equal gains and two peaks with unequal gains, all indicating that the criteria result in better sidelobe suppression.