Jointly Optimal Array Geometries and Waveforms in Active Sensing: New Insights Into Array Design via the Cramér-Rao Bound

Abstract

This paper investigates jointly optimal array geometry and waveform designs for active sensing. Specifically, we focus on minimizing the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRB) of the angle of a single target in white Gaussian noise. We first find that several array-waveform pairs can yield the same CRB by virtue of sequences with equal sums of squares, i.e., solutions to certain Diophantine equations. Furthermore, we show that under physical aperture and sensor number constraints, the CRB-minimizing receive array geometry is unique, whereas the transmit array can be chosen flexibly. We leverage this freedom to design a novel sparse array geometry that not only minimizes the single-target CRB given an optimal waveform, but also has a nonredundant and contiguous sum co-array—a desirable property when launching independent waveforms, with relevance also to the multi-target case.