Optimal adaptive waveform design for cognitive MIMO radar

This paper addresses the problem of adaptive waveform design for estimation of parameters of linear systems. This problem arises in several applications such as radar, sonar, or tomography. In the proposed technique, the transmit/input signal waveform is optimally determined at each step based on the observations in the previous steps. The waveform is determined to minimize the Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound (BCRB) or the Reuven-Messer bound (RMB) for estimation of the unknown system parameters at each step. The algorithms are tested for spatial transmit waveform design in multiple-input multiple-output radar target angle estimation at very low signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed techniques allow to automatically focusing the transmit beam toward the target direction. The simulations show that the proposed adaptive waveform design methods achieve significantly higher rate of performance improvement as a function of the pulse index, compared to other signal transmission methods, in terms of estimation accuracy.