MIMO Radar Beampattern Design Based on Manifold Optimization Method

The transmit beampattern design with constant modulus (CM) constraint is a key technical issue in Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar system. The problem is non-convex and direct solution is impossible in general, due to the CM constraint. Usually, most existing methods indirectly solve this problem by relaxing it to a more tractable form. These methods usually either degrade the performance due to relaxation or consume expensive computational cost. Different from the relaxation methods, a direct method is proposed to solve the non-convex problem without relaxation. In the proposed method, the original problem is first converted to an Unconstrained Quadratic Lagrange Multiplier Problem (UQLMP) over the non-convex complex circle manifold. Then, by efficiently finding the descent direction and step size to ensure the objective function to be non-increasing, a novel Manifold Optimization-based Conjugate Gradient (MOCG) approach is derived to directly solve UQLMP. Compared with current methods, the proposed method has better performance in terms of nulling depth.