Robust Joint Transmit and Receive Beamformer Design for Dual-Function Radar-Communication Systems

The performance of linear beamforming schemes for dual-function radar-communication systems can be quite sensitive to the accuracy of the available knowledge of the communication channels and the radar environment. To address that sensitivity, we develop a technique that jointly designs the transmit beamformers and the radar receive beamformers so as to optimize the worst-case radar signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), while guaranteeing that the communication users achieve their specified SINRs with a given probability of outage. We then exploit the structure of the design formulation to obtain a technique that requires less computational effort. The proposed designs provide significantly better performance than the design based on perfect knowledge of the environment, and better performance than a variant of that design that incorporates an intuitive robustness heuristic.