Radar-Centric Collaborative Joint Precoding Schemes for Multiuser, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output, Dual-Function Radar Communications Systems

This paper investigates novel radar-centric joint collaborative precoding schemes for multiuser, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) dual-function radar communications (DFRC) systems. Three base station (BS) collaboration scenarios are considered: 1) collaboration only in radar signals, 2) collaboration only in communication signals, and 3) collaboration in both radar and communication signals. We first present the problem formulation for each considered scenario and then propose a suboptimal algorithm using alternating optimization and quadratic transform. Additionally, a post-processing procedure is proposed to generate the required rank-one solution. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed radar-centric collaborative schemes can provide significant communication performance gain compared to the benchmark radar-centric non-collaborative DFRC scheme, highlighting the advantages of taking BS collaboration into consideration in DFRC systems.