Joint Optimization of Transmitting and Multiple Receiving Beams within Overlapped Subarray Structure

Overlapped subarray is an attractive structure to achieve low-cost multiple receive beams. However, satisfactory weights of overlapped subarray is hard to design, especially considering the transmit beam pattern. In this paper, a method to optimize the receive excitation of overlapped subarrays on the basis of a given transmit pattern is proposed. The relationship between the two-level weights and the two kinds of sidelobes is analyzed at first. Then, a squential convex programming strategy is adapted to optimize the element-level and subarray-level weights jointly to match the pre-defined transmit beam pattern. The required multi-beam coverage region and minimal sidelobe level could be obtained after these steps. Numerical experiments are presented to verify the effectiveness of this method.