Hybrid Beamforming with Sub-arrayed MIMO Radar: Enabling Joint Sensing and Communication at mmWave Band

In this paper, we propose a beamforming design for dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems at the mil-limeter wave (mmWave) band, where hybrid beamforming and sub-arrayed MIMO radar techniques are jointly exploited. We assume that a base station (BS) is serving a multi-antenna user equipment (UE), which in the meantime actively detects multiple targets. Given the optimal communication beam-former and the desired radar beampattern, we propose to design the analog and digital beamformers under non-convex constant-modulus (CM) and power constraints, such that the weighted summation of the communication and radar beam-forming errors is minimized. The formulated optimization problem can be decomposed into three subproblems, and is solved by the alternating minimization approach. Numerical simulations verify the feasibility of the proposed beamforming design, and show that our approach offers a favorable performance tradeoff between sensing and communication.