Joint Design of Variable-pulse-width Radar Pulse Trains and Receive Mismatched Filtering

Low-sidelobe waveforms are fundamental for ensuring the basic detection performance of radars. Designing waveforms with low sidelobes in the range dimension, the velocity dimension, or both, remains a major challenge in radar research. To address the issue of sidelobe suppression in the velocity dimension for coherent pulse trains, this paper proposes a joint design method of variable-pulse-width pulse trains and receive mismatched filtering. The proposed method uses a symmetric positive window function to directly construct both the pulse width sequence and the receive weighting sequence. As a result, the characteristics of the window function’s amplitude spectrum, including low sidelobes and the broadening of the 3-dB mainlobe, are transferred into the mismatched filtering output of the coherent pulse train. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed method incurs a smaller mismatched Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) loss than when the window function is applied solely for receive mismatched filtering. The effects of window functions and the minimum pulse-width constraint on SNR loss and weak target detection performance under strong target interference are analyzed through simulations, illustrating the advantages of the proposed joint transceiver design method.