Joint transceive beamforming for multistatic radar system by semi-definite relaxation method

The joint transmit and receive beamforming algorithm has been envisioned to optimise the target's signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio by co-designing the transmit and receive beamforming vectors simultaneously. However, the traditional design concepts for this algorithm only consider the monostatic radar system, which may not work as well for the multistatic radar system. The authors present a novel transmit and receive beamforming algorithm for the multistatic radar system that includes a common transmitter and multiple receivers. The transmit beamforming vector can directly influence the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio of each radar subsystem. To ensure the balanced performance of the subsystems, the authors propose a weighted sum of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio optimisation problem to co-design the transmit and receive beamforming. The proposed problem is non-convex, and the authors construct an iterative algorithm to solve it using semi-definite relaxation and slack-variable replacement techniques. By using pre-determined weights, the output performance of each radar subsystem can be effectively regulated. The simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm can ensure better output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio for the entire multistatic radar system than the conventional joint transmit and receive beamforming algorithm.