Joint design of transmit and receive beamforming for interference mitigation

Conventional phased-array radar forms a transmit beam pointed to a target of interest, whereas a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar employs omni-directional transmission. In both systems, the transmission process takes place without accounting for any interference sources present in the radar scene; and interference mitigation is performed primarily through a receive beamformer. In this paper, we consider joint design of the transmit and receive beamforming in an active array by exploiting a-priori information on the locations of the target and interference. We propose a cyclic optimization algorithm to maximize the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) with respect to the transmit and, respectively, receive beamforming vector. Numerical results demonstrate that a significant gain in the output SINR can be achieved by the proposed scheme, compared to the conventional phased-array radar and the MIMO radar.