Joint Design of IntraCInter Agile Pulses and Doppler Filter Banks for Doppler Ambiguous Target

This paper deals with the joint design of intra-inter agile pulses and Doppler filter banks to improve Doppler ambiguous target detectability in signal-dependent mainlobe clutter. Assuming that the target's range and Doppler frequency (RDF) belong to an uncertainty set and that the clutter knowledge is partially known, a robust processing procedure based on a pulse compression matched filter and Doppler filter banks is proposed for the echo of the pulses with non-uniform pulse repetition interval (PRI). Then, the worst-case signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the output of all receive filters as the figure of merit is considered to be optimized along with both peak-to-average power ratio (PAR) constraint and energy constraint on the transmitted pulses. Utilizing an equivalent reformulation of the resultant non-convex maximin optimization problem, a maximum block improvement (MBI) framework that partitions the optimization variable into multiple blocks and updates only the block yielding the maximum increase of the objective function at each iteration, is developed to increase the worst-case SINR monotonically. Each block mainly invokes majorization-maximization (MM), sequential convex approximation (SCA) and entropy mirror descent (EMD) to obtain an enhanced solution. Two design strategies are also developed to seek valuable PRIs. Finally, at the analysis stage, the performance of the proposed robust technique is assessed, showing its capability for Doppler ambiguous target detection in a cluttered environment.