Robust design of transmit code and receive filter for extended targets in clutter

We propose a novel robust design method to jointly optimize the radar transmit code and receive filter, exploiting the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the receiver end as design figure of merit. We confer robustness to our method against uncertainties on the target impulse response (TIR) using a worst-case optimization approach. Precisely, we model the uncertainty set as a finite collection of TIRs, obtained sampling the actual TIR at some aspect angles. We further enforce a peak-to-average power ratio (PAR) constraint to the transmit code, which is very important for radar applications, where the transmitter operates close to saturation. The design problem is tackled using a sequential optimization procedure alternating between two semi-definite programming (SDP) problems, followed by randomization steps. Our numerical results highlight the robustness and applicability of the proposed method.