Unified Optimization Framework for Multi-Static Radar Code Design Using Information-Theoretic Criteria

In this paper, we study the problem of code design to improve the detection performance of multi-static radar in the presence of clutter (i.e., a signal-dependent interference). To this end, we briefly present a discrete-time formulation of the problem as well as the optimal detector in the presence of Gaussian clutter. Due to the lack of analytical expression for receiver operation characteristic (ROC), code design based on ROC is not feasible. Therefore, we consider several popular information-theoretic criteria including Bhattacharyya distance, Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, J-divergence, and mutual information (MI) as design metrics. The code optimization problems associated with different information-theoretic criteria are obtained and cast under a unified framework. We propose two general methods based on Majorization-Minimization to tackle the optimization problems in the framework. The first method provides optimal solutions via successive majorizations whereas the second one consists of a majorization step, a relaxation, and a synthesis stage. Moreover, derivations of the proposed methods are extended to tackle the code design problems with a peak-to-average ratio power (PAR) constraint. Using numerical investigations, a general analysis of the coded system performance, computational efficiency of the proposed methods, and the behavior of the information-theoretic criteria is provided.