Designing Unimodular Sequence Sets With Good Correlations—Including an Application to MIMO Radar

A multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system that transmits orthogonal waveforms via its antennas can achieve a greatly increased virtual aperture compared with its phased-array counterpart. This increased virtual aperture enables many of the MIMO radar advantages, including enhanced parameter identifiability and improved resolution. Practical radar requirements such as unit peak-to-average power ratio and range compression dictate that we use MIMO radar waveforms that have constant modulus and good auto- and cross-correlation properties. We present in this paper new computationally efficient cyclic algorithms for MIMO radar waveform synthesis. These algorithms can be used for the design of unimodular MIMO sequences that have very low auto- and cross-correlation sidelobes in a specified lag interval, and of very long sequences that could hardly be handled by other algorithms previously suggested in the literature. A number of examples are provided to demonstrate the performances of the new waveform synthesis algorithms.