Monopulse Beam Synthesis Using a Sparse Single Layer of Weights

A conventional monopulse radar system uses three beams, namely, sum beam, elevation difference beam, and azimuth difference beam, which require different layers of weights to synthesize each beam independently. Since the multilayer structure increases the hardware complexity, many simplified structures based on a single layer of weights have been suggested. In this communication, we introduce a new technique for finding disjoint and fully covering sets of weight vectors, each of which constitutes a sparse subarray, forming a single beam. Our algorithm decomposes the original nonconvex optimization problem for finding disjoint weight vectors into a sequence of convex problems. We demonstrate the convergence of the algorithm and show that the interleaved array structure is able to meet difficult beam constraints.