Coherent FDA Radar Systems: Joint Design of Transmitting and Receiving Array Weighters

Due to the frequency offset across its array elements, frequency diverse array (FDA) will generate angle-range-dependent and time-variant transmit beampattern. Since existing investigations usually focus on FDA transmitter and only instantaneous beampattern is considered, which cannot fully exploit the time-range characteristics of FDA radar for enhanced performance, in this paper we formulate a multi-carrier mixing receiver for coherent pulsed-Doppler FDA radar to effectively retain the range information of FDA radar returned signals in subsequent receiver processing. Accordingly, the joint transmitter and receiver is systematically modeled with time-range relationship consideration. More importantly, we optimally design the joint transmitting and receiving weighters by maximizing the radiated energy within the desired range-angle sections for given total energy. All proposed methods are verified by simulation results.