Transmit Design for Joint MIMO Radar and Multiuser Communications with Transmit Covariance Constraint

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the design of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitter which simultaneously functions as a MIMO radar and a base station for downlink multiuser communications. In addition to a power constraint, we require the covariance of the transmit waveform be equal to a given optimal covariance for MIMO radar, to guarantee the radar performance. With this constraint, we formulate and solve the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) balancing problem for multiuser transmit beamforming via convex optimization. Considering that the interference cannot be completely eliminated with this constraint, we introduce dirty paper coding (DPC) to further cancel the interference, and formulate the SINR balancing and sum rate maximization problem in the DPC regime. Although both of the two problems are non-convex, we show that they can be reformulated to convex optimizations via the Lagrange and downlink-uplink duality. In addition, we propose gradient projection based algorithms to solve the equivalent dual problem of SINR balancing, in both transmit beamforming and DPC regimes. The simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvement of DPC over transmit beamforming, and also indicate that the degrees of freedom for the communication transmitter is restricted by the rank of the covariance.