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fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2018.2864302, IEEE
Communications Letters
SUBMITTED TO IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, AUGUST 2018.
Waveform Design in MIMO Radar Using Radial
Point Interpolation Method
Sadjad Imani, Mostafa Bolhasani, Seyed Ali Ghorashi, Senior Member, IEEE, and Mehdi Rashid
Abstract—In this paper, we consider the problem of wave-
form design in colocated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
radars in order to obtain a desired beampattern. In this problem,
practical constraints such as constant envelope (CE) and low peak
to average power ratio are very important. Therefore, we propose
a simple method to generate some practical waveforms such
as different version of phase shift keying and pulse amplitude
modulation. We map a non CE to the desired finite alphabet by a
mapping function (MP). In the proposed method, first, the values
of cross-correlation (CC) relationship between the input and
output of MP are calculated in a few points, and then using radial
point interpolation method, the mentioned relationship and its
first order derivative are derived in the remaining points. Finally,
we use the obtained derivative in order to design the desired
waveform in an unconstraint problem by a gradient descend
algorithm. Simulation results show that there are many different
waveforms on which the proposed method can approximate the
desired beampattern with high accuracy.
Index Terms—MIMO radar, waveform design, finite alphabet,
radial point interpolation method (RPIM).
I. I NTRODUCTION
INCE many years ago, the development of multiple-
S input multiple-output (MIMO) radars has been a hot topic
in radar systems. MIMO radars use waveform diversity in
order to achieve several advantages such as better angular
resolution, larger aperture and more detectable targets rather
than conventional phased array radars [1], which send a single
waveform from their antennas.
Based on the type of antenna arrangement, MIMO radars
are classified into widely separated [2], and colocated [3].
In the former case, transmitting antennas are far from each
other so that every antenna see a different aspect of target.
This configuration results in a better target detection and
higher angular resolution [4], [5]. On the other hand, colocated
radars which is the focus of this paper equipped with an
antenna array whose inter-elements spacing are comparable
to the wavelength and can cohere the transmit power in the
region of interest with more flexibility [2]. Also the number
of targets that can be detected simaltenously will be increased
[6]. Morover colocated radars have higher degrees of freedom
in beampattern design compared to phased array radars.
S. Imani (email: sa_imani@sbu.ac.ir) is with the Department of Electrical
Engineering, Sharif University, Tehran, Iran.
S. A. Ghorashi (email: a_ghorashi@sbu.ac.ir) and M. Bolhasani (email:
m_bolhasani@sbu.ac.ir) are with the Cognitive Telecommunication Research
Group, Department of Telecommunications, Faculty of Electrical Engineering,
Shahid Beheshti University, G.C., Tehran, Iran.
M. Rashid (email: mehdirashid79@yahoo.com) is with the Faculty of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, K. N. Toosi University of Technology,
Tehran, Iran.
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1
Transmitting waveform design in colocated MIMO radars
has gained significant attention in the literature [7]-[14]. This
issue involves two steps. In the first step, in order to achieve
the desired beampattern a proper covariance matrix of antenna
waveforms is derived [7], [10], [12]. Second step involves de-
sign a set of waveforms that can realize the derived covariance
matrix [8], [11].
In [7], the concept of beampattern design in colocated
MIMO radars is introduced and the authors proposed several
sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithms in order
to design covariance matrices with high accuracy for various
purposes such as decrease side lobe levels (SLL) in transmit
beampattern. However, the computational complexity of this
method is high. In order to remove the constraints from the
optimization problem of [7], an unconstraint one is proposed in
[10] with norm-1 and norm-2 cost functions which results a
covariance matrix with better accuracy. Also, they proposed
another method with low computation time that is solved
by gradient descent algorithm. Although in [10], the second
algorithm does not guaranty to achieve positive semidefinite
covariance matrix, but can be used as an initial value for
the first algorithm to increase the convergence speed. Other
closed form methods are presented in [12] and [13], which
are based on discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in 1-D and 2-
D beampatterns, have low computation time compared to the
SQP method in [7].
In MIMO radars, in order to radio frequency amplifiers work
at maximum efficiency, we need a set of CE waveforms. In [8],
the authors proposed an optimization problem to approximate
the covariance matrix with a set of CE waveforms. However,
waveform symbols must be chosen from an infinite alphabet,
which makes it difficult to implement. In [11], a closed-
form solution is proposed to obtain binary phase shift keying
(BPSK) waveforms whose its implementation is simple. How-
ever, in this solution the desired covariance matrix must satisfy
some specific constraints. Also, the authors in [13], extend the
method in [11] to achieve pulse amplitude modulations (PAM)
and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). It should be
noted that, there is no guaranty to design positive semidifinite
covariance matrix in these two mentioned methods. In [16], the
authors designed the best transmit waveforms with low number
of samples which is not considered in last two methods,
however, this method needs additional complexity.
In this paper, we propose a method to generate a set of
waveforms with specific properties such as finite alphabet,
CE and positive semidefinite covariance matrix. We introduce
several mapping functions (MP) to map non CE random
variables (RVs) to the desired alphabet. Then the cross-
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SUBMITTED TO IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, AUGUST 2018.
correlation (CC) between the input and output of MP will be
computed. We use an uncostrained optimization problem that
introducted in [11], to design desired beampattern. To solve
this problem, a gradient descend algorithm is used that needs
the first order derivative of CC relationship between the input
and output of MP. In [11] and [13], CC relationship for some
finite alphabets such as BPSK, PAM and QAM is obtained
in a very complicated way . On the other hands, there is a
radial point interpolation method (RPIM) that can interpolate
a function and its derivatives with high precision by having a
few points of it. In this paper, we use RPIM method to derive
the first order derivative of mentioned CC relationship that
is required in gradient descend algorithm. Therfore, without
solving a complicated mathematical problem, we can generate
every desired alphabet with mentioned practical constraints.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. The
problem is formulated in II. The proposed waveform design
method is introduced in III. The simulation results and con-
clusion are presented in IV and V respectively.
Notaion: Matrices and vectors demonstrate by Bold upper
case letters, X, and lower case letters, x, respectively. (.)−1 ,
(.) H and (.)T denote inverse, conjugate transpose and transpose
of a matrix, respectively. The statistical expectation is denoted
by E {.}.
II. P ROBLEM F ORMULATION
In this paper, we consider a uniform linear array (ULA) of
collocated MIMO radar, with half-wavelength inter-element
spacing. Let sm (n) be the baseband transmit waveform from
antenna m = 1, ..., Mt , at time sample n = 1, ..., L, where Mt
and L stand for the number of transmit antennas and sample
number in each waveform respectively. Therefore, s(n) =
[s1 (n) s2 (n) ... s Mt (n)]T is the transmit vector in time sample
n. For a target located at angle location θ, the n received signal
o ξ,R g
2
and power are at (θ)T s(n) and P(θ) = E at (θ)T s(n)
T
at (θ) R at (θ), where R is the covariance matrix of transmit
vector s(n). Also at (θ) = [1 e−jπ sin(θ) ... e−jπ(Mt −1) sin(θ) ]T is
the transmit steering vector. Therefore, it is clear that transmit
power at space can be controlled by proper design of the
covariance matrix R. To meet the equal transmition power
from each antenna, the diagonal elements of R must be equal.
On the other hand, to guaranty that the designed matrix is a
covariance matrix, R must be positive semidefinite. Therefore,
by considering these two constraints on R, transmit covariance
matrix can be obtained as [7]
K
min 1
(atH (θ k )R at (θ k )
Í
− ξφ(θ k ))
ξ,R K k=1
s.t. R  0, R(m, m) = P/Mt , m = 1, ..., Mt
where φ(θ k ), ξ, P and K are the desired beampattern, tun-
ning factor, total transmit power and sample grid in space
respectively. In (1), the first constraint shows the positive
semidefinite and the second one shows the equal transmission
power from each transmit antenna. After synthesizing the
covariance matrix, the waveforms can be obtained as [8]
1 J(β) =
S = BΛ W H 2
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Communications Letters
2
Fig. 1. Realizing the covariance matrix R with i.i.d RVs.
where S = [s1 s2 ... s Mt ] defines the transmit waveforms
matrix, B ∈ CL×Mt is a matrix of zero mean and unit
variance Gaussian RVs, Λ ∈ CMt ×Mt denotes the diagonal
matrix of eigenvalues and W ∈ CMt ×Mt is a matrix of the
eigenvectors of R. In (2), the distribution in the columns of S is
Gaussian, therefore the envelope of the obtained waveform is
not constant. Usually in multiple antenna systems it is desired
to have a waveform with CE property or known alphabet such
as PAM and phase shift keying (PSK). Therefore, in the next
section we are going to design the waveform with a specific
desired alphabet.
III. WAVEFORM D ESIGN
In this section we propose a method to design the covariance
matrix R. We first map the i.i.d Gaussian RVs X ∈ CL×Mt to
Gaussian RVs Y ∈ CL×Mt with covariance matrix Rg (see
Fig. 1). Then Y are mapped to the real or complex desired
alphabet (e.g. PAM and PSK) Z, by Mt nonlinear functions
µ (y). Therefore, by introducing R = Ψ(Rg ), where Ψ(.) is a
function that shows the CC relationship between the input and
output of MP, the problem in (1) can be reformulated as
K 2
1
(atH (θ k )Ψ(Rg ) at (θ k ) − ξφ(θ k ))
Í
min
K
k=1 (3)
= s.t. Ψ(Rg )  0, Ψ(Rg )(m, m) = MPt , m = 1, ..., Mt
Let zi = µ (yi ) and z j = µ y j be MF output of Gaussian


RVs yi and y j with the CC coefficient ρi j = E {yi y ∗j }/σi σj ,
then the CC between zi and z j can be derived by (4), where
σi2 is the variance of yi and p(yi, y j ; ρi j ) is the joint PDF of
yi and y j . As can be seen in (4), in general, calculating γi j
and then Ψ(.) is a complicated mathematical problem.
∫∞ ∫∞
γi j = zi z ∗j p(yi, y j ; ρi j ) dzi dz j (4)
−∞ −∞
2 After obtaining Ψ(.), similar to [11], the constrained prob-
. (1) lem in (3) is converted to an unconstrained one. In [11],
it is shown that to remove the first constraint the matrix
Rg must be in the form of UU H , also to remove the
second one, matrix U must be in the form of (5). Let
ω = [ω21 ω31 ω32 ... ω Mt (Mt −1) ]T be the spherical angle
vector [11], and β = [ω ξ]T , then the resulting unconstrained
problem can be written as
K
1 Õ H 2
(a (θ k )Ψ(Rg ) at (θ k ) − ξφ(θ k )) (6)
(2) K k=1 t
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Communications Letters
SUBMITTED TO IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, AUGUST 2018. 3

Î M−1
 1
 sin(ω21 ) sin(ω31 ) sin(ω32 ) ··· sin(ω M m )
m=1


Î M−2
 cos(ω21 ) sin(ω31 ) cos(ω32 ) ··· m=1 sin(ω M m ) cos(ω M, M−1 ) 
..
 
U=  cos(ω31 ) .. (5)
 
.
.

 

 sin(ω M1 ) cos(ω M2 ) 


 cos(ω M m ) 


where Rg = UU H . Here, we have no proof for the convexity of 1 8

CPM =1
CPM α = 1
the J(β) in (6), however, in order to analyze the convergence MASK M = 4
6
MASK M = 4
MPSK M=32
0.5 MPSK M = 32
of the proposed RPIM method by applying a gradient descent MRPSK M = 16 MRPSK M=16
BPSK in [11]
BPSK in [11]
algorithm, similar to [11], it can be shown that for different

ij
0 4

/
γ
initial random points, J(β) converges to a global minimum. -0.5 2
Therefore, to obtain ω and ξ, we can use gradient descend
-1 0
algorithm. To solve problem in (6) with mentioned algorithm, -1 -0.5 0
ρij
0.5 1 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1

the first order derivatives relative to ξ and an element of ω

say ωmn are required. This derivatives can be derived as (a) (b)

K
∂ J(β) −2 Õ  H  Fig. 2. (a) The CC relationship between mapped RVs and desired alphabets.
= at (θ k )Ψ(Rg ) at (θ k ) − ξφ(θ k ) φ(θ k ) (7) (b) derivative of the CC relationship which is calculated by RPIM.
∂ξ K k=1

K We can generate MPAM waveform from real RVs as follows

∂J(β)
= 2
atH (θ k )Ψ(Rg ) at (θ k ) − ξφ(θ k )
Í

∂ω mn K
k=1
∂(atH (θk )Ψ(R g )at (θk ))

 −M + 1 Q−1 (1/M) < y ≤ ∞
×  −M + 3 Q−1 (2/M) < y ≤ Q−1 (1/M)

∂ω mn

1

K (8) µ(y) = .. (11)
= K 2 Í
atH (θ k )Ψ(Rg ) at (θ k ) − ξφ(θ k ) η


 .
 Mk=1M  
 M −1

−∞ < y ≤ Q−1 (M − 1/M)
Ít Ít −jπ(h−l) sin(θk ) ∂(Ψ(Rg (h,l))) 
× e ∂ω mn
h=1 l=1 where η is a real parameter that controls the transmit power.
Also continuous phase modulation (CPM), can be obtained by
It should be noted that for every desired alphabet, function
as
Ψ (.) has not a closed form, therefore there is no closed form
∂(Ψ(R g (h,l))) µ(y) = sign(y)e jα sign(y)y (12)
for its first derivative ∂ω mn in (8). In [11] and [15],
based on a complicated mathematical solution, this fuction where α is a real number that can change the phase of CPM for
is extracted for some specific finite alphabets such as BPSK different purposes such as reducing the probability of passive
and PAM. Here, we propose to obtain the first derivative of detection of the waveform with interception systems. In order
Ψ (.) by a simple interpolation method (RPIM) instead of the to generate finite phase PSK (called MRPSK) from the real
complicated solution in [11] and [13]. RPIM is an interpolation RVs, the MF is defined as
method that is able to interpolate an unknown function and its
derivatives by using the finite known value of it. Therefore, we

 1 Q−1 (1/M) < y ≤ ∞
Q−1 (2/M) < y ≤ Q−1 (1/M)

use the RPIM method to calculate ∂ Ψ(Rg (h, l)) ∂ωmn from  e j2π/M

 

µ(y) = .

(13)
finite known values of Ψ which are obtained by our proposed 
 ..
mapping functions in three steps: a) generate yi and y j with 
 e j2π(M−1)/M

−∞ < y ≤ Q−1 (M − 1/M)
ρi j for all values of ρi j (from -1 to 1) b) map the yi and y j 
to zi and z j by proposed MP (µ (y)) c) obtain the correlation
coefficient of zi and z j as IV. N UMERICAL R ESULTS
In this section, we evaluate the performance of our proposed
L
1Õ method compared to the method in [11]. We consider a ULA
γi j = zi (n)z j (n) H /σi σj (9)
L n=1 with Mt = 10 transmit antennas with half-wavelength inter-
element spacing and assume the number of waveform samples
Here, we have listed some MPs to generate desired alphabet. is L = 70. Fig. 2 (a) shows the CC relationship between
To generate finite alphabet PSK waveform from complex RVs mapped random RVs (Gaussian RVs) and desired alphabets
(called MPSK), the MF is defined as that is derived by (9), and Fig. 2 (b) shows derivative of
this relationship which is calculated by RPIM. It should be

 1 0 < ∠(y) ≤ 2π/M noted that these results for different desired alphabets are
2π/M < ∠(y) ≤ 2 × 2π/M

 e j2π/M


µ(y) = .

(10) not comparable with each other, and only represents the

 .. performance of RPIM. In Fig. 2, MASK stands for M-ary

 e j2π(M−1)/M 2π(M − 1)/M < ∠(y) ≤ 2π amplitude shift keying.



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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2018.2864302, IEEE
SUBMITTED TO IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, AUGUST 2018.
15
BPSK in [11] 15
Given R [12]
CPSK =1
MPAM M=16
BPSK in [5]
10 MPSK M=32
MRPSK M=4 10 Given R [12]
CPSK
P( )
P( )
CPM =0.8
MPAM M=4
MPSK M= 32
5 5
MRPSK M=4
CPM
0 0
-50 0 50 -50
(a)
Fig. 3. Transmit beampattern using our proposed and the BPSK waveform
design method in [11] (a) one region of interest and (b) two regions of interest.
Fig. 3 (a) shows the transmit beampattern using our pro-
posed and the BPSK waveform design method in [11]. Ac-
cording Fig. 3, it can be stated that the obtained beampatterns
of 16PAM and 32PSK, which have more amplitudes and
phases rather than BPSK and 4RPSK , are closer to optimal
beampattern. In this simulation, the optimal covariance matrix
has been achieved by the DFT based method in [12]. Indeed,
each alphabet in which its covariance matrix is closer to the
optimal one in [12], has better performance. In this figure,
CPSK stands for continuous PSK which can take any phase. In
the second simulation, the desired beampattern is considered in
order to cohere the transmit power in two region of the space,
θ ∈ [−40◦, −15◦ ] ∪ [15◦, 40◦ ]. Fig. 3 (b) shows the transmit
beampattern using all of the methods in this scenario. As can
be seen from this figure, an alphabet which has more degrees
of freedom, can achieve better performance. Here it should
be noted that, our main purpose of these simulation is not to
compare with the results of [11] and [13], In other words, our
purpose is to achieve a simpler solution in order to generate
each desired alphabet rather than [11],
 [13].  IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 55, no. 8, pp. 4151-4161,
2
By introducing MSE = 10 × log Ropt − Rd F , Fig. 4
shows the difference between optimal covariance matrix in
[12] and the covariance matrix achieved by our proposed
mapping functions and BPSK method in [11], corresponding to
the simulation of Fig. 3 (a). As can be seen, the PAM alphabets
have lower MSE compared to the PSK ones. It means, having
degrees of freedom in amplitudes of waveform symbols is
better than in phases (e.g. 4PAM is better than 32PSK). This
result is shown in [13], which is also true for our proposed
method. In this figure, UPSK stands for uniform PSK.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this work, we proposed a method to generate finite
alphabet waveforms in order to satisfy practical constraints
such as CE or low low peak to average power ratio. We have
mapped non constant envelop RVs to the desired alphabet
by introducing a mapping function. Then we calculated the
CC relationship between the input and output of MP and
also calculated the first order derivative of this relationship
by RPIM. Next, we used these functions in order to solve
the unconstraint optimization problem by a gradient descend
algorithm. By solving these optimization problem, we have
achieved a various set of alphabets that can realize a desired
waveform covariance matrix. In fact, our proposed method
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Communications Letters
4
10
5
=1
MSE (dB)
0
= 0.8
BPSK in [11]
CPSK = 1
-5 MPAM M=4
0 50 MPAM M=16
MPSK M=4
MPSK M=32
-10
(b) MRPSK M=256
UPSK = 0
UPSK = 0.8
-15
10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Number of sample in each waveform (L)
Fig. 4. The difference between optimal covariance matrix in [12] and the
covariance matrix achieved by our proposed mapping functions and BPSK
method in [11].
can generate each desired alphabet without a closed form CC
relationship.
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