Distributed Beamforming for Joint Radar-Communications

Distributed co-phasing has received much attention recently to achieve distributed beamforming because of its simplicity and support of numerous power transmission schemes. In this context, we study distributed beamforming for a joint distributed radar-communications (JDRC) system. We employ a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar that operates within the same frequency spectrum as a full-duplex (FD) wireless sensor network of multiple FD transceiver, receive-only and transmit-only nodes. We formulate a joint beamformer and MIMO radar code co-design non-convex optimization problem based on the co-phasing technique and solve it using the block coordinate descent method. Numerical experiments demonstrate performance improvement in JDRC over the conventional beamforming strategies.