Generalized waveform design for sidelobe reduction in MIMO radar systems.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars transmit a set of sequences that exhibit small cross-correlation sidelobes, which enhance sensing performance by separating them at the matched filter outputs. Small auto-correlation sidelobes are also required in order to avoid masking of weak targets by the range sidelobes of strong targets and to mitigate the negative effects of distributed clutter. In light of these requirements, in this paper, we design a set of phase-only (constant modulus) sequences that exhibit near-optimal properties in terms of Peak Sidelobe Level (PSL) and Integrated Sidelobe Level (ISL). At the design stage, we adopt weighted ℓ p -norm of auto- and cross-correlation sidelobes as the objective function and minimize it for a general p value, using block successive upper bound minimization (BSUM). Considering the limitation of radar amplifiers, we design unimodular sequences which make the design problem non-convex and NP-hard. To tackle the problem, in every iteration of the BSUM algorithm, we introduce different local approximation functions and optimize them concerning a block, containing a code entry or a code vector. The numerical results show that the performance of the optimized set of sequences outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts, in terms of both PSL values and computational time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]