Waveform Design for Joint Radar-Communications with Low Complexity Analog Components

In this paper, we aim to design an efficient and low hardware complexity based dual-function multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) joint radar-communication (JRC) system. It is implemented via a low complexity analog architecture, constituted by a phase shifting network and variable gain amplifier. The proposed system exploits the multiple antenna transmitter for the simultaneous communication with multiple downlink users and radar target detection. The transmit waveform of the proposed JRC system is designed to minimize the downlink multi-user interference such that the desired radar beampattern is achieved and the architecture specific constraints are satisfied. The resulting optimization problem is non-convex and in general difficult to solve. We propose an efficient algorithmic solution based on the primal-dual framework. The numerical results show enhanced performance of the proposed approach when compared to existing state-of-the-art fully-digital method.