Transmit array resource allocation for radar and communication integration system

This paper considers a joint scheme of array resource allocation and transmit beamforming for radar and communication integration (RCI) capable of multiple target tracking and channel communication. The primary objective is to jointly minimize the Cramér–Rao lower bound (CRLB) of tracking filtering and Bit Error Rate (BER) of the communication subsystem. Firstly, two constrained optimization models are constructed and combined to obtain the RCI. Next, Majorization minimization (MM) is employed to convert the resulting optimization into a surrogate simpler problem, which is then solved by projected gradient descent (PGD). In addition, a transmit beampattern design problem is considered through optimizing the waveform covariance matrix under the shared and separated deployment. An appropriate beampattern is obtained based on array resource constraint, employing the PGD, while the peak power of the transmit beam is guaranteed for each target. Furthermore, iterative shrinkage-thresholding is applied as acceleration to the PGD in each algorithm. Numerical experiments are provided to illustrate the efficient performance of the joint array allocation and transmit beamforming for the RCI system, where the convergence of the algorithms is also confirmed. •Antenna resources are allocated for the radar and communication integration system.•As a hard-to-tackle optimization, the array allocation scheme is solved efficiently.•Multiple transmit beamforming is designed for separated and shared array deployments.