Transmit Sequence Design for Dual-Function Radar-Communication System With One-Bit DACs

In this paper, the problem of transmit sequence design for a dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) system equipped with one-bit digital-to-analog converters (DACs) is investigated. More specifically, a nonconvex problem is formulated by minimizing the symbol mean-square error, while ensuring the target localization performance for radar. A direct one-bit sequence design tackled by an alternating minimization (AM) approach, which involves a simple unconstrained quadratic sub-problem with closed-form solution and a quadratically constrained nonconvex sub-problem tackled by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm, is developed. The solutions of primal variables under the ADMM framework are provided and the convergence is discussed. Additionally, an indirect but computationally more efficient design, which is realized by transmit beamforming based on an accelerated primal gradient (APG) method, is presented. For better understanding of this design, both the Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB) and symbol error probability of the resulting beamformer with one-bit quantization using the Bussgang theorem are analyzed. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.