Range-angle-dependent beamforming for FDA radar with Hamming interelement spacing and sinusoidal multicarrier approach

By employing a tiny frequency offset across the array elements, a frequency diverse array (FDA) produces a beampattern with the property of being range-angle-dependent. However, the beampattern of a traditional FDA has many maxima at undesired range-angle couples, which is unfavorable for target localization and jamming suppression. In this paper, a novel FDA scheme with Hamming interelement spacing, namely, the HIS-FDA, is proposed. By adopting Hamming window weighted interelement spacing and frequency offsets optimized by the genetic algorithm, the HIS-FDA produces a dot-shaped well-performed beampattern, which has superior performance over the existing FDA systems, especially in the angle dimension. The multiple input multiple output technique and multiple matched filters are employed at the receiver to solve the time-varying problem. A new multicarrier (MC) technique termed the sinusoidal MC approach is also presented to improve the beampattern performance, especially in the range dimension. Our proposed scheme outperforms the existing FDA systems in terms of the mainlobe width in the range and angle profiles, the sidelobe level, and the range-angle spatial region of the mainlobe. Comparison results are provided to validate the superiority of the proposed scheme.