Due to the uncertainties of radar target prior information in the actual scene, the waveform designed based on radar target prior information cannot meet the needs of detection and parameter estimation performance. In this paper, the optimal waveform design techniques under energy constraints for different tasks are considered. To improve the detection performance of radar systems, a novel waveform design method which can maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for known and random extended targets is proposed. To improve the performance of parameter estimation, another waveform design method which can maximize the mutual information (MI) between the radar echo and the random-target spectrum response is also considered. Most of the previous waveform design researches assumed that the prior information of the target spectrum is completely known. However, in the actual scene, the real target spectrum cannot be accurately captured. To simulate this scenario, the real target spectrum was assumed to be within an uncertainty range where the upper and lower bounds are known. Then, the SINR- and MI-based maximin robust waveforms were designed, which could optimize the performance under the most unfavorable conditions. The simulation results show that the designed optimal waveforms based on these two criteria are different, which provides useful guidance for waveform energy allocation in different transmission tasks. However, under the constraint of limited energy, we also found that the performance improvement of SINR or MI in the worst case for single targets is less significant than that of multiple targets.

Due to the uncertainties of the radar target prior information in the actual scene, the waveform designed based on the radar target prior information cannot meet the needs of parameter estimation. To improve the performance of parameter estimation, a novel transmitted waveform design method under the hierarchical game model of radar and jammer, which maximizes the mutual information (MI) between the radar target echo and the random target spectrum response, is proposed. In the hierarchical game model of radar and jammer, the radar is in a leading position while the jammer is in a following position. The strategy of the jammer is optimized based on the radar transmitted waveform of previous moment, then the radar selects its own strategy based on the strategy of the jammer. It is generally assumed that the radar and the jammer have intercepted the real target spectrum and then the optimal jamming and the optimal transmitted waveform spectrum are obtained. However, the exact characteristic of the real target spectrum is hard to capture accurately in actual scenes. To simulate this, the real target spectrum is considered to be within an uncertainty range which is confined by known upper and lower bounds. Then, the minimax robust jamming and the maximin robust transmitted waveform are designed successively based on the MI criteria, which optimizes the performance under the most unfavorable condition of the radar and the jammer, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate that the robust transmitted waveform design method guarantees the parameter estimation performance effectively and provides useful guidance for waveform energy allocation.

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This study deals with the problem of radar waveform design based on the weighted mutual information (MI) and the difference of two mutual information metrics (DMI) in signal-dependent interference. Since the target and clutter information are included in the received signal at the beginning of the design, DMI-based waveform is designed according to the following criterion: maximizing the MI between the received signal and target impulse response while minimizing the MI between the received signal and the clutter impulse response. This criterion is equivalent to maximizing the difference between the first MI and the second MI. Then maximizing the difference of two types of MI is used as the objective function, and the optimization model with the transmitted waveform energy constraint is established. In order to solve it, we resort to maximum marginal allocation (MMA) method to find the DMI-based waveform. Since DMI-based waveform does not allocate energy to the frequency band where the clutter power spectral density (PSD) is greater than the target PSD, we propose to weight the MI-based waveform and DMI-based waveform to synthesize the final optimal waveform. It could provide different trade-offs between two types of MI. Simulation results show the proposed algorithm is valid.

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