The authors address the problem of designing a waveform for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar under the important practical constraints of constant modulus and waveform similarity. Incorporating these constraints in an analytically tractable manner is a longstanding open challenge. This is due to the fact that the optimization problem that results from signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) maximization subject to these constraints is a hard non-convex problem. The authors develop a new analytical approach that involves solving a sequence of convex quadratically constrained quadratic programing (QCQP) problems, which they prove converges to a sub-optimal solution. Because an improvement in SINR results via solving each problem in the sequence, they call the method Successive QCQP Refinement (SQR). Furthermore, the proposed SQR method can be easily extended to incorporate emerging requirements of spectral coexistence, as shown briefly in this paper. The authors evaluate SQR against other candidate techniques with respect to SINR performance, beam pattern, and pulse compression properties in a variety of scenarios. Results show that SQR outperforms state-of-the-art methods that also employ constant modulus and/or similarity constraints while being computationally less burdensome.

A popular approach to estimate a source location using time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurements is to construct an objective function based on the maximum likelihood (ML) method. An iterative algorithm can be employed to minimize that objective function. The main challenge in this optimization process is the non-convexity of the objective function, which precludes the use of many standard convex optimization tools. Usually, approximations, such as convex relaxation, are applied, resulting in performance loss. In this work, we take advantage of difference-of-convex (DC) programming tools to develop an efficient solution to the ML TDOA localization problem. We show that, by using a simple trick, the objective function can be modified into an exact difference of two convex functions. Hence, tools from DC programming can be leveraged to carry out the optimization task, which guarantees convergence to a stationary point of the objective function. Simulation results show that, when initialized within the convex hull of the anchors, the proposed TDOA localization algorithm outperforms a number of benchmark methods, behaves as an exact ML estimator, and indeed achieves the Cramér-Rao lower bound.

We address the problem of designing a transmit beampattern for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar considering co-existence with wireless communication systems. The designed beampattern is able to manage the transmit energy in spatial directions as well as in spectral frequency bands of interest by minimizing the deviation of the designed beampattern versus a desired one under a spectral constraint as well as the constant modulus constraint. While unconstrained beampattern design is straightforward, a key open challenge is jointly enforcing the spectral constraint in addition to the constant modulus constraint on the radar waveform. A new approach is proposed in our work, which involves solving a sequence of constrained quadratic programs such that constant modulus is achieved at convergence. Further, we show that each problem in the sequence has a closed form solution leading to analytical tractability. We evaluate the proposed beampattern with interference control (BIC) algorithm against the state-ofthe-art MIMO beampattern design techniques and show that BIC achieves closeness to an idealized beampattern along with desired spectral shaping

In this paper, we propose techniques for joint transmit and receive beamforming in downlink multi-user MIMO systems under Rayleigh fading channel using the knowledge of second-order statistics. The contribution of our work is twofold. First, we derive a closed-form expression of the outage probability for a general channel model using recent covariance shaping method and for the conventional Kronecker structured model. Second, we present an outage minimization technique obtained by designing the transmit and receive beamformers. The transmit beamformers maximizes the statistics of signal-to-leakage-plusnoise ratio, while the receive beamformers minimizes the crosscovariance of all users. Our techniques are “blind” in the sense that they do not require the transmission of pilot symbols, nor the estimation of the instantaneous state of the channel making them bandwidth efficient. The derived theoretical results are validated via Monte Carlo simulations and show significant reduction in the outage probability by employing the proposed statistical beamforming techniques.

The continuous wavelet transform (CWT) has been used in radar-based vital signs detection to identify and to remove the motion artifacts from the received radar signals. Since the CWT algorithm is computationally heavy, the processing of this algorithm typically results in long processing time and complex hardware implementation. The algorithm in its standard form typically uses software processing tools and is unable to support high-performance data processing. The aim of this research is to design an optimized CWT algorithm architecture to implement it on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) in order to identify the unwanted movement introduced in the retrieved vital signs signals. The optimization approaches in the new implementation structure are based on utilizing the frequency domain processing, optimizing the required number of operations and implementing parallel processing of independent operations. Our design achieves significant processing speed and logic utilization optimization. It is found that processing the algorithm using our proposed hardware architecture is 48 times faster than processing it usingMATLAB. It also achieves an improvement of 58% in speed performance compared to alternative solutions reported in literature. Moreover, efficient resources utilization is achieved and reported. This advanced performance of the proposed design is due to consciously implementing comprehensive approaches of multiple optimization techniques that results in multidimensional improvements. As a result, our achieved design is suitable for utilization in high-performance data processing applications.

In this work, we investigate the performance of an ambiguity function-shaped waveform (AFSW) using a millimeter-wave photonics-based radar system at 100 GHz. An AFSW is a radar waveform whose ambiguity function can be shaped to increase the peak-to-sidelobe ratio (PSR) for better detectability of targets in a desired range/velocity region. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first in the literature that investigates the performance of such a waveform in a photonics-based radar system. We experimentally compare the AFSW performance to the conventional frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW). The experimental results show the ability of the AFSW to achieve a PSR of 38.35 dB compared to the PSR of 14.5 dB obtained using the conventional FMCW. Moreover, we investigate the effects of some optical system impairments on the AFSW, such as: (i) optical modulator nonlinearity, (ii) optical modulator bias drift, and (iii) sampling offset error between the transmitter and receiver.