Joint Design of Transmit and Receive Beamforming for Transmit Subaperturing Airborne MIMO Radar

This paper deals with the joint design of transmit and receive beamforming for airborne transmit subaperturing (TS) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar to improve moving target detection performance in the presence of signal-dependent clutter background. The considered system is referred to as an airborne TS-MIMO radar, whose transmit array is divided into several subarrays to form the steerable waveforms with directional gain. The joint design of transmit and receive beamforming problem is formulated by maximizing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) under the energy constraint. To resolve the resulting non-convex joint design problem, we devise a sequential optimization algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is monotonically increasing and convergent, and exhibits superior property to compared methods in terms of moving target detection performance.