Adaptive beamforming for MIMO radar with sidelobe control based on second order cone programming

The beampattern of the traditional MVDR beamformer for MIMO radar always has unacceptably high sidelobe levels, especially when the transmit antennas are located more than a half wavelength apart from each other. To overcome this shortcoming, we proposed a new adaptive beamforming algorithm with sidelobe control for MIMO radar. Our method minimizes the power of interferences and noise, while maintaining distortionless response in the direction of target of interest and keeping the sidelobe levels lower than some prescribed threshold value. The second order cone (SOC) formulation of our proposed beamformer is derived which can be easily solved using the well-established interior point method. Simulation results show that our proposed beamformer has substantially lower sidelobe levels than the traditional MVDR one. Both theoretical analyses and simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.