Pattern synthesis of thinned multi‐input multi‐output radar using difference set and differential evolution

Abstract

To lower the side lobe level of MIMO (Multi-input Multi-output) radar, a new method, diffenence set and diffderential evolution (DSDE), was proposed. The newly proposed method can arrange the location of the linear MIMO radar antenna arrays by differential set (DS) and optimize the excitation amplitude of each antenna by Differential Evolution (DE). DS is a kind of analysis calculation method, which has faster calculation speed than intelligent optimization methods and has solid optimization ability in thinned antenna array optimization problems. Besides, DE is one of the best stochastic optimization methods which can keep the diversity and avoid premature of the population. Consequently, the proposed DSDE can achieve high performance in the arrangement of arrays and excitation amplitude optimization. Numerical experiments are conducted to test the performance of the proposed algorithm, and the results showed that the analysis optimization method and stochastic optimization method are suitable for solving the problem of pattern synthesis of MIMO radar and keep the diversity with better convergence.