Grating-Lobe Clutter Suppression in Uniform Subarray for Airborne Radar STAP

Abstract

This paper aims to address grating-lobe clutter suppression in a uniform subarray (US) for the airborne radar system. Due to the sparsity at the subarray level and different scanning angles between the inner subarray and the subarray, grating lobes are produced. The grating-lobe clutter then enters the main lobe, defined as main grating-lobe clutter (MGLC). When the target falls into the MGLC with the same Doppler frequency, the clutter cannot be effectively suppressed by the conventional space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithm. Hence, we design a transmit beamforming (TB)-STAP algorithm based on a modified phased array (MPA) radar system, where TB suppresses the MGLC, while STAP suppresses the main-lobe and sidelobe clutter; the goal is to maximize the output signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio (SCNR). The optimal solution of TB-STAP can be obtained through several iterations, and in each iterative algorithm, the TB is a quadratically constrained quadratic problem (QCQP) solved via the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique, and the STAP can obtain a closed solution by the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) algorithm. The simulation results show that compared with traditional STAP in PA and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars, the proposed algorithm in MPA radar greatly improves the output SCNR.