Design of Frequency Hopping Waveforms With Good Correlation Properties for Joint MIMO Radar and Communications

In this paper, we design the multiple frequency-hopping (FH) waveforms for the joint radar and communications, aiming to improve correlation properties of waveforms and meanwhile to guarantee high-quality information transmission. To this end, we first establish an appropriate model for the FH waveforms. Then, we exploit the frequency diversity of waveforms to implement information embedding (IE) in the fast-time domain from the communication side, and utilize the flexibility of initial phases of waveforms to reduce the integrated sidelobe level (ISL) of FH waveforms from the radar point of view. We propose the waveform design that minimizes ISL under constraints of fast-time IE and constant-modulus waveform property, which is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem. To solve it, we explore the inherent algebraic structures and apply elementary properties to transform its objective function into a tractable form. Our major contributions also lie in elaborating a series of proper majorants for the reformulated objective function via majorization-minimization technique, which helps us to derive closed-form solutions for iterations. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed design.