A New Transmit Beamforming Algorithm for
Subarray MIMO Radar
Yong-hao Tang, Xiao-feng Ma, Wei-xing Sheng, Yu-bing Han
School of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China
Email: tangyonghao1988@gmail.com; maxiaofeng@njust.edu.cn; wxsheng@yahoo.com.cn; hanyb@njust.edu.cn
Abstract—Benefiting from its extra degrees of freedom
brought by waveform diversity, MIMO radar allows to
optimize the transmit beam-pattern much more freely. In
this paper, a new transmit beamforming algorithm is
proposed for subarray MIMO radar. Firstly, the correlation
matrix of the transmitted waveforms is optimized to focus
the transmit energy within the interested sectors. Then, the
eigendecomposition method is applied to calculate the
subarray beamforming weights according to optimized
correlation matrix. Meanwhile, a principle for determining
the number of the subarrays is proposed, which will reduce
the computational complexity for subarray MIMO radar. In
addition, simulation results show that the proposed method
obtains a better DOA estimation performance compared to
some of the existing transmit beamforming methods.
Keywords—Subarray MIMO radar, Transmit Beamforming,
Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, Eigendecomposition
method.
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, MIMO radar as an emerging field of
radar research has attracted more and more attentions of
scientific researchers [1][2]. Compared with conventional
phased-array radar, MIMO radar may have a similar array
structure, whereas the transmitted waveforms may be
quite different from each other. Due to the extra degrees
of freedom offered by waveform diversity, MIMO radar
obtains superior capabilities compared with conventional
phased-array radar, such as higher spatial angular
resolution and better parameter identifiability [3-6].
Estimating directions-of-arrival (DOAs) of multiple
targets is one of the most important radar applications in
practice. As we all known, spatial angular resolution of
radar is inversely proportional to effective array aperture.
Compared to conventional phased-array radar, MIMO
radar has a higher angular resolution for its larger
effective array aperture provided by waveform diversity.
978-1-4673-1127-4/12/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE
Some classic DOA estimation algorithms have been
applied to MIMO radar, such as ESPRIT and MUSIC
[7-9]. For the reason of larger virtual effective aperture
that obtained by MIMO radar, in some scenarios, these
algorithms applied by MIMO radar will have better DOA
estimation performance than that applied by conventional
phased-array radar. However, the performance of DOA
estimation algorithms is still affected by SNR. MIMO
radar transmitting orthogonal waveforms is faced with the
problem of SNR gain loss, which is unfavorable for DOA
estimation.
In order to mitigate the effects of the SNR gain loss,
some energy focus methods are developed for MIMO
radar recently. These methods can be classified into two
categories: the MIMO radar transmitting partially
correlated signals [10][11] and the transmit array
partitioning based MIMO radar [5][12]. The former
focuses the transmit energy within expected spatial
sectors by optimizing the correlation matrix of the
transmitted signals, which will help to increase the SNR
gain obtained at the receiver. However, the shortcomings
of this method are that designing the partially correlated
signals according to the optimized correlation matrix has
a high computational cost and errors which cannot be
ignored. The later one partitions the transmit array of
MIMO radar into several subarrays. Each subarray
transmits different waveform independently.
Consequently, transmit coherent gain can be obtained in
each subarray, which will enhance the performance of
DOA estimation algorithms. Nevertheless, it is a quadratic
programming problem to design the transmit
beam-pattern of the transmit array partitioning based
MIMO radar, which is often difficult to be solved by
convex optimization algorithms directly. Actually, the two
types of MIMO radar mentioned above are both
sacrificing part of the effective array aperture for transmit
255
coherent gain.
In this paper, a new transmit beamforming algorithm
is proposed for subarray MIMO radar. The correlation
matrix of the transmitted waveforms is optimized firstly,
by which the transmit energy is focused within the
interested sectors. Once the optimized correlation matrix
is obtained, eigendecomposition method is applied to
calculate the subarray beamforming weights. Meanwhile,
fewer orthogonal waveforms are transmitted in the
proposed method compared to conventional MIMO radar,
which means that less number of subarrays will be used.
The reduction in the number of transmitted orthogonal
waveforms can effectively reduce the computational
complexity at the receiver. In addition, the proposed
method overcomes the shortcoming of subarray MIMO
radar that it is difficult to optimize the beamforming
weights of sub-arrays directly, and enables us to design
the correlation matrix more freely without considering of
the partially correlated signals design.
This paper is organized as follows. In section II, the
principle and mathematical model of the proposed
transmit beamforming algorithm are discussed. The
simulation results compared to other two methods are
shown to prove the correctness of the proposed algorithm
in section III. Finally, a brief conclusion is given in
section IV.
II. PRINCIPLE OF THE ALGORITHM
Consider a MIMO radar equipped with a transmit
array of Mt antennas and a receive array of Mr antennas.
The transmit and receive arrays are both uniform linearly
array (ULA), and they are assumed to be closely located
so that both of them can see a target located in the
far-field at the same spatial angle. Assume that the
transmit array is partitioned to N subarrays, the transmit
beamforming weights of which are defined
cn(n=1,…,N). Note that cn is M×1 weight vector, the zero
element in which represents that the corresponding
antenna does not belong to the nth subarray. Therefore,
the transmit energy of the nth subarray received at the
angle θ can be written as
sn (t , θ ) = cn a (θ )Φ n (t )
H
n = 1,..., N
where Фn(t) is the nth waveform in orthogonal waveforms
set Ф(t). Thus, the sum of all the beams of subarrays
pointing at the spatial angle θ can be written as
N
s (t , θ ) = ∑ cn H a (θ )Φ n (t ) = (C H a (θ )) T Φ N (t )
n =1
(2)
where C=[c1,…,cN] is the transmit beamforming weight
matrix with a dimension of Mt×N, and ФN(t)=[Ф1(t),…,
ФN(t)]T is the N×1 transmitted orthogonal waveforms.
Then, the transmit beam-pattern can be written as
{ }
P (θ ) = Ε s (t ,θ ) s H (t ,θ )
H T
{ }
= (C a (θ )) Ε Φ N (t )Φ N H (t ) (C a (θ ))
H ∗
(3)
H H H
= a (θ )CC a (θ ) = a ( θ) RC a (θ )
where
H
RC = CC . (4)
Obviously, P(θ) is a linear function in terms of the
correlation matrix RC. As a result, transmit beam-pattern
could be optimized by convex optimization methods
conveniently, such as the methods in [5] and [10]. Once
the optimized correlation matrix RC has been obtained, we
could calculate the subarray beamforming weights C
according to the equation (4). The eigendecomposition of
the RC is given as follows:
H
RC = UΛU
(5)
where Λ is the M×M diagonal matrix whose diagonal
elements are the eigenvalues of RC, and U are the
eigenvectors of RC. It is worth noting that RC is not
always full rank, and some of the eigenvalues are small
relatively (often less than 1% of the largest eigenvalue). In
other words, these zero or small eigenvalues and their
corresponding eigenvectors make few, if any, contribution
to the overall transmit beam-pattern. Therefore, only the N
largest eigenvalues (whose sum exceeds 99%) and their
corresponding eigenvectors are selected to constitute the
as subarray beamforming weights, i.e.
 ) ⋅ Δ]
 [ sqrt ( Λ
C=U
(6)
where Λ is the N×N diagonal matrix whose diagonal
elements are the N principal eigenvalues of RC,

U Δ is the
contains corresponding eigenvectors, and
correction factor for transmit energy ensuring that
(1)
trace (CC H ) = E (7)
256
where E denotes the total transmit energy.
2
10
menthod in [5]
III. SIMULATION RESULTS The proposed method
1
10 menthod in [3]
In the section, a MIMO radar system is assumed to
have a transmit array of Mt=10 omni-directional antennas
0
10

RMSE(DEGREES)
spaced half a wavelength apart, which is also used as the -1
10
receive array. The transmit energy E is set as 10. The
additive noise is Gaussian zero-mean σ2-variance spatially -2
10

and temporally white. Two uncorrelated targets are -3

10
located at directions -1° and 1°, respectively. For the
reason of comparison, we also give the simulations of the -4
10
-30 -20 -10 0 10 20 30 40
MIMO radar which transmits partially correlated SNR(dB)

waveforms in [5]and the transmit array partitioning based Fig. 2 Results of 400 Monte Carlo simulations versus SNR for
MIMO radar in [6]. Throughout our experiments, the ESPRIT-based DOA estimators
number of snapshots is set as L=256 and each method has
completed 400 independent runs in the Monte-Carlo It is defined in [13] that targets can be considered to
analysis and the probability of source resolution test
respectively. be resolved if the following is satisfied:
Fig.1 shows the overall transmit beam-patterns of the Δθ
three kinds of MIMO radar. It can be noticed that the θn − θ n ≤ n = 1, 2 (8)
2
proposed method and the method in [5] have the where θ= θ1－θ2 . Figure 3 shows the probability of
approximate beam-patterns, which are higher than that in resolution versus SNR for all the methods. From this
[6]. It is because of that the former two methods both figure, it is easy to find that the method in [6] has the
adopt the Min-max Sidelobe Beam-pattern Design in [5] worst probability of resolution under low SNR. The
and the proposed method has an approximate correlation proposed method (N=2) has the best probability of
matrix to it in [5]. However, the proposed method has the resolution performance obviously with the least
best DOA estimation performance shown in figure 2, computational complexity of O(23Mr3).
especially under the poor SNR, for the reason that less
orthogonal waveforms are transmitted in the proposed
1
method.
Probability of targets resolution

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2
menthod in [5]
The proposed method
menthod in [6]
0
-30 -20 -10 0 10 20 30 40
SNR(dB)

Fig. 3 Probability of target resolution versus SNR for

ESPRIT-based DOA estimators

Fig. 1 Overall transmit beam-patterns of the three mehtods IV. CONCLUSION

In this paper, the proposed transmit beamforming for
subarray MIMO radar can achieve a superior performance
257

of DOA estimation. First, the correlation matrix of
transmitted waveforms is optimized to focus the transmit
energy within the interested sectors. Then, a principle is
proposed to transmit fewer orthogonal waveforms, and
consequently fewer subarrays are used. Meanwhile, the
proposed method obtains the subarray beamforming
weights indirectly by applying the eigendecomposition
method, which avoids the difficulty in optimizing the
subarray beamforming weights directly and saves the
computational cost of designing the partially correlated
signals according to the optimized correlation matrix.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grants 11273017.
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