MIMO Radar: A Multi-Sensor Spatially Diverse Radar Architecture

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research supported the research on MIMO radar carried out at the New Jersey Institute of Technology during the period from December 2005 to November 2008 under the agreement number FA9550-06-1-0026. The purpose of this report is to summarize the proceedings and findings of the studies supported by this agreement. Starting with a short introduction, this report provides an overview of the research results on distributed MIMO radar with respect to localization accuracy gain and techniques, ambiguity resolution techniques, and waveform design. MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) radar refers to an architecture that employs multiple, spatially distributed transmitters and receivers. While, in a general sense, MIMO radar can be viewed as a type of multistatic radar, the separate nomenclature suggests unique features that set MIMO radar apart from the multistatic radar and establishes close relation to MIMO communications. This report documents our work on MIMO radar with widely separated antennas thus called "distributed MIMO radar". Widely separated transmit/receive antennas capture the spatial diversity of the target's radar cross section (RCS). Unique features of MIMO radar are explained and illustrated by examples. It is shown that with non-coherent processing, a target's RCS spatial variations can be exploited to obtain a diversity gain for target detection and for estimation of various parameters, such as angle of arrival and Doppler. For target location, it is shown that coherent processing can provide a resolution far exceeding that supported by the radar's waveform. The research supported by the grant: (a) provides an in depth analysis of the localization accuracy gain attainable with the MIMO radar systems by means of the Cramer-Rao Lower bound [1] (b)introduces the geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) metric and the contour