Transmit Beampattern Synthesis for Active RIS-Aided MIMO Radar via Waveform and Beamforming Optimization

In conventional colocated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars, practical waveform constraints including peak-to-average power ratio, constant or bounded modulus lead to a significant performance reduction of transmit beampattern, especially when the element number is limited. This paper adopts an active reconfigurable intelligent surface (ARIS) to assist the transmit array and discusses the corresponding beampattern synthesis. We aim to minimize the integrated sidelobe-to-mainlobe ratio (ISMR) of beampattern by the codesign of waveform and ARIS reflection coefficients. The resultant problem is nonconvex constrained fractional programming whose objective function and plenty of constraints are variable-coupled. We first convert the fractional objective function into an integral form via Dinkelbach transform, and then alternately optimize the waveform and ARIS reflection coefficients. Three types of waveforms are unifiedly optimized by a consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (CADMM)-based algorithm wherein the global optimal solutions of all subproblems are obtained, while the ARIS reflection coefficients are updated by a concave-convex procedure (CCCP)-based algorithm. The convergence is also analyzed based on the properties of CADMM and CCCP. Numerical results show that ARIS-aided MIMO radars have superior performance than conventional ones due to significant reduction of sidelobe energy.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Enabled Array Radar for Interference Mitigation

Conventional active array radars often jointly design the transmit and receive beamforming for effectively suppressing interferences. To further promote the interference suppression performance, this paper introduces a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to assist the radar receiver because the RIS has the ability to bring plentiful additional degrees-of-freedom. To maximize the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of receive array, we formulate the codesign of transmit beamforming and RIS-assisted receive beamforming into a nonconvex constrained fractional programming problem, and then propose an alternating minimization-based algorithm to jointly optimize the transmitor beamfmer, receive beamformer and RIS reflection coefficients. Concretely, we translate the RIS reflection coefficients design into a series of unimodular quadratic programming (UQP) subproblems by employing the Dinkelbach transform, and offer the closed-form optimal solutions of transmit and receive beamformers according to the minimum variance distortionless response principle. To tackle the UQP subproblems efficiently, we propose a second-order Riemannian Newton method (RNM) with improved Riemannian Newton direction, which avoids the line search and has better convergence speed than typical first-order Riemannian manifold optimization methods. Moreover, we derive the convergence of the proposed codesign algorithm by deducing the explicit convergence condition of RNM. We also analyze the computational complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed RIS-assisted array radar has superior performance of interference suppression to the RIS-free one, and the SINR improvement is proportional to the number of RIS elements.

TransMUSIC: A Transformer-Aided Subspace Method for DOA Estimation with Low-Resolution ADCs

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation employing low-resolution analog-to-digital convertors (ADCs) has emerged as a challenging and intriguing problem, particularly with the rise in popularity of large-scale arrays. The substantial quantization distortion complicates the extraction of signal and noise subspaces from the quantized data. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel approach that leverages the Transformer model to aid the subspace estimation. In this model, multiple snapshots are processed in parallel, enabling the capture of global correlations that span them. The learned subspace empowers us to construct the MUSIC spectrum and perform gridless DOA estimation using a neural network-based peak finder. Additionally, the acquired subspace encodes the vital information of model order, allowing us to determine the exact number of sources. These integrated components form a unified algorithmic framework referred to as TransMUSIC. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the TransMUSIC algorithm, even when dealing with one-bit quantized data. The results highlight the potential of Transformer-based techniques in DOA estimation.

LiQuiD-MIMO Radar: Distributed MIMO Radar with Low-Bit Quantization

Distributed MIMO radar is known to achieve superior sensing performance by employing widely separated antennas. However, it is challenging to implement a low-complexity distributed MIMO radar due to the complex operations at both the receivers and the fusion center. This work proposed a low-bit quantized distributed MIMO (LiQuiD-MIMO) radar to significantly reduce the burden of signal acquisition and data transmission. In the LiQuiD-MIMO radar, the widely-separated receivers are restricted to operating with low-resolution ADCs and deliver the low-bit quantized data to the fusion center. At the fusion center, the induced quantization distortion is explicitly compensated via digital processing. By exploiting the inherent structure of our problem, a quantized version of the robust principal component analysis (RPCA) problem is formulated to simultaneously recover the low-rank target information matrices as well as the sparse data transmission errors. The least squares-based method is then employed to estimate the targets' positions and velocities from the recovered target information matrices. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed LiQuiD-MIMO radar, configured with the developed algorithm, can achieve accurate target parameter estimation.

Time Encoding Sampling of Bandpass Signals

This paper investigates the problem of sampling and reconstructing bandpass signals using time encoding machine(TEM). It is shown that the sampling in principle is equivalent to periodic non-uniform sampling (PNS). Then the TEM parameters can be set according to the signal bandwidth and amplitude instead of upper-edge frequency and amplitude as in the case of bandlimited/lowpass signals. For a bandpass signal of a single information band, it can be perfectly reconstructed if the TEM parameters are such that the difference between any consecutive values of the time sequence in each channel is bounded by the inverse of the signal bandwidth. A reconstruction method incorporating the interpolation functions of PNS is proposed. Numerical experiments validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed TEM scheme.

Space-Time Adaptive Processing Using Random Matrix Theory Under Limited Training Samples

Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is one of the most effective approaches to suppressing ground clutters in airborne radar systems. It basically takes two forms, i.e., full-dimension STAP (FD-STAP) and reduced-dimension STAP (RD-STAP). When the numbers of clutter training samples are less than two times their respective system degrees-of-freedom (DOF), the performances of both FD-STAP and RD-STAP degrade severely due to inaccurate clutter estimation. To enhance STAP performance under the limited training samples, this paper develops a STAP theory with random matrix theory (RMT). By minimizing the output clutter-plus-noise power, the estimate of the inversion of clutter plus noise covariance matrix (CNCM) can be obtained through optimally manipulating its eigenvalues, and thus producing the optimal STAP weight vector. Two STAP algorithms, FD-STAP using RMT (RMT-FD-STAP) and RD-STAP using RMT (RMT-RD-STAP), are proposed. It is found that both RMT-FD-STAP and RMT-RD-STAP greatly outperform other-related STAP algorithms when the numbers of training samples are larger than their respective clutter DOFs, which are much less than the corresponding system DOFs. Theoretical analyses and simulation demonstrate the effectiveness and the performance advantages of the proposed STAP algorithms.