Joint Waveform and Passive Beamformer Design in Multi-IRS-Aided Radar

Abstract: Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) technology has recently attracted a significant interest in non-light-of-sight radar remote sensing. Prior works have largely focused on designing single IRS beamformers for this problem. For the first time in the literature, this paper considers multi-IRS-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar and jointly designs the transmit unimodular waveforms and optimal IRS beamformers. To this end, we derive the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of target direction-of-arrival (DoA) as a performance metric. Unimodular transmit sequences are the preferred waveforms from a hardware perspective. We show that, through suitable transformations, the joint design problem can be reformulated as two unimodular quadratic programs (UQP). To deal with the NP-hard nature of both UQPs, we propose unimodular waveform and beamforming design for multi-IRS radar (UBeR) algorithm that takes advantage of the low-cost power method-like iterations. Numerical experiments illustrate that the MIMO waveforms and phase shifts obtained from our UBeR algorithm are effective in improving the CRLB of DoA estimation.