Non-continuous piecewise nonlinear frequency modulation pulse with variable sub-pulse duration in a MIMO SAR radar system.

This paper proposes an implementation of non-continuous piecewise nonlinear frequency modulation (N-PNLFM) signals in MIMO radar which are composed of a sequence of N-PNLFM subpulses. The N-PNLFM subpulse can be divided into three segments, the first and third segment are composed of linear frequency modulation (LFM) waveforms. The LFM waveforms in each N-PNLFM subpulse will be orthogonal in one sequence of our new N-PNLFM signal. A non-linear frequency modulation (NLFM) waveform is in the central component of each N-PNLFM subpulse, the bandwidths of each NLFM waveforms are distributed randomly. Each subpulse can be controlled by different variable parameters in both auto-correlation and cross-correlation functions. In order to suppress the high sidelobes in the new N-PNLFM signal and increase the diversity of signals, each subpulse duration is also distributed randomly. Our proposed PNLFM signals are optimized by applying a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Comparing with other PNLFM signals, numerous simulations illustrate that our implementation achieves better performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]