5Multi-objective waveform design for cognitive radar

An important characteristic of a cognitive radar is the capability to adjust its transmitted waveform to adapt to the radar environment. The adaptation of the transmit waveform requires an effective framework to synthesize waveforms that could provide different trade-offs between a variety of performance objectives. In this paper, phase-coded waveform, whose modulus is constant, is considered to be synthesized to realize a smooth trade-off between maximizing output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a particular target and the mutual information (MI) between the received signal and the target response. A new iterative algorithm is proposed to synthesize constant modulus waveform to maximize SNR and MI simultaneously. Simulation results show that the performance of the synthesized waveforms is satisfactory and can approximate the ideal waveform.