Fast Gradient-Based Algorithm for Doppler-Tolerant Radar Waveform Design

This letter presents an efficient algorithm for designing Doppler-tolerant radar waveforms with superior computational efficiency. The proposed method jointly minimizes the peak sidelobe level (PSL) and mainlobe loss level (MLL) under Doppler shifts by introducing a dynamic weighting strategy that adaptively balances these competing objectives. To address the resulting non-convex optimization problem, log-sumexp smoothing combined with automatic differentiation is employed, enabling efficient gradient-based optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves 1 dB lower PSL than the state-of-the-art maximum block improvement (MBI) method with comparable MLL, while being up to 8 times faster computationally. Moreover, the algorithm scales efficiently to longer code lengths, making it particularly suitable for practical radar applications requiring adaptive waveform design.