Robust Joint Design of Transmit Waveform and Receive Filter for MIMO-STAP Radar Under Target and Clutter Uncertainties

This paper deals with the joint design problem of transmit waveform and receive filter for the robust detection of ground moving target with multiple-input multiple-output Space time adaptive processing (MIMO- STAP) radar in the presence of target and clutter uncertainties. With the prior knowledge of target and clutter statistics, the averaged signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is formulated as a figure of merit to maximize. The robust joint design problems for the continuous and discrete phase cases, respectively, are formulated with the constant-modulus and similarity constraints. Then, an efficient iterative algorithm is developed for improving the SINR. Specifically, each iteration of the proposed algorithm involves the generalized eigenvalue decomposition to optimize the receive filter, while a nested iterative procedure involving Dinkelbach’s framework and alternating direction penalty method (ADPM) algorithm to design transmit waveform. The proposed algorithm can achieve higher SINR with reduced computational load compared to the recently developed ones. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for the robust detection of moving target in MIMO-STAP radar.