Joint design of the discrete phase transmit sequence and receive filter in radar systems

Abstract

In this study, the joint design of discrete phase transmit sequences and receive filters with the low peak sidelobe level and integrated sidelobe level in radar systems is considered. The problem is formulated as a minimisation of the peak (integrated) sidelobe level, forcing a unimodular discrete phase constraint at the design stage. To deal with the resulting non‐convex and in general the NP‐hard optimisation problem, an iterative method based on the alternate optimisation approach is proposed. Each iteration of the proposed method involves a non‐convex min–max problem to be solved. In addition, a sequential rank‐one constraint relaxation framework is proposed to initialise the procedure, each iteration of which requires the solution of a convex problem. Simulation results show that using the proposed framework for jointly finding transmit sequences and receive filters leads to a better peak sidelobe ratio and integrated sidelobe ratio for discrete phase sequences than the optimal mismatched filters design approach.