Efficient low-PAR radar waveform design method based on the alternating direction method of multipliers for multiple missions

This study addresses the low-peak-to-average power ratio (PAR) radar waveform design problem to optimise the detection and estimation performance simultaneously in the presence of signal-dependent clutter. The aim is to realise an effective trade-off between maximising the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and mutual information (MI) under a low-PAR constraint. In the existing method, this problem is solved via convex optimisation, but the high computational complexity of this method limits its application. Motivated by the decomposability and superior convergence of the alternating direction method of multipliers, the authors propose an efficient method to obtain the optimal waveform by converting the original non-convex problem into simpler convex sub-problems that can be solved efficiently. The simulation results illustrate that the optimal waveform can be obtained efficiently within the given low-PAR range and that the synthesised waveform can provide a reasonable trade-off between the detection and estimation performances. Compared with the existing method, the proposed method has reduced computational complexity without SINR and MI performance degradations.