Cognitive anti-deception-jamming for airborne array radar via phase-only pattern notching with nested ADMM

Abstract

Deceptive jamming may not only induce a large amount of false alarms and deteriorate the target detection performance, but also lead to degraded space-time adaptive processing (STAP) performance in an airborne radar. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a cognitive transmitting scheme to counter the deceptive jamming for airborne array radar. The proposed approach is composed of two steps. The first step is the deceptive jamming perception. A specially designed high pulse repetition frequency (PRF) waveform is transmitted, and then the deceptive jamming is identified according to the angle clustering feature of the false targets. In the second step, the phase-only transmit pattern with notches at the jammers' directions is designed. The encountered pattern synthesis problem is nonconvex due to the fixed excitations constraint. To solve this problem, a nested alternating direction method of multipliers (N-ADMM) is proposed. With the developed approach, the radiated power at the jammers' directions is attenuated significantly. Therefore, the probing signal possesses the characteristic of low probability of intercept (LPI). Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.