Fast Transmit Beamforming for Large Planar MIMO Radar

A fast method of transmit beamforming for large planar Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar is proposed. For MIMO radar with large elements, it is difficult to design a large number of orthogonal waveforms. We design a weight matrix to connect orthogonal waveforms and array elements. We optimize the weight matrix such that the transmit beampattern approximates the desired transmit beampattern. By introducing an auxiliary variable, a cyclic optimization algorithm based on Fast fourier transform (FFT) is proposed to obtain the optimal weight matrix, which is very efficient and can satisfy the real-time requirements. Numerical examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.