Information Content Based Optimal Radar Waveform Design: LPI’s Purpose

This paper presents a low probability of interception (LPI) radar waveform design method with a fixed average power constraint based on information theory. The Kullback–Leibler divergence (KLD) between the intercept signal and background noise is presented as a practical metric to evaluate the performance of the adversary intercept receiver in this paper. Through combining it with the radar performance metric, that is, the mutual information (MI), a multi-objective optimization model of LPI waveform design is developed. It is a trade-off between the performance of radar and enemy intercept receiver. After being transformed into a single-objective optimization problem, it can be solved by using an interior point method and a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. Simulation results verify the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed LPI radar waveform design method.