MIMO radar: an idea whose time has come

• Published in: 2004 IEEE Radar Conference pp. 71 - 78
• Main Authors: Fishler, E., Haimovich, A., Blum, R., Chizhik, D., Cimini, L., Valenzuela, R.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway, NJ IEEE 2004
• Subjects: Antennas; Applied sciences; Array signal processing; Detection, estimation, filtering, equalization, prediction; Directive antennas; Exact sciences and technology; Information, signal and communications theory; Maximum likelihood estimation; MIMO; Radar antennas; Radar cross section; Radiocommunications; Radiolocalization and radionavigation; Sensor arrays; Signal and communications theory; Signal, noise; Sonar; Spaceborne radar; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Transmitting antennas; Performance evaluation; MIMO system; Direction-of-arrival estimation; Parameter estimation; Nuisance parameter; Signal estimation; Radiolocalisation; Scintillation; Beam forming; Mean square error; Accuracy; Radar target; Transmitting antenna; Telecommunication system; Radar; Antenna array; Cramer Rao inequality
• ISBN: 078038234X; 9780780382343
• DOI: 10.1109/NRC.2004.1316398

It has recently been shown that multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna systems have the potential to improve dramatically the performance of communication systems over single antenna systems. Unlike beamforming, which presumes a high correlation between signals either transmitted or received by an array, the MIMO concept exploits the independence between signals at the array elements. In conventional radar, target scintillations are regarded as a nuisance parameter that degrades radar performance. The novelty of MIMO radar is that it takes the opposite view; namely, it capitalizes on target scintillations to improve the radar's performance. We introduce the MIMO concept for radar. The MIMO radar system under consideration consists of a transmit array with widely-spaced elements such that each views a different aspect of the target. The array at the receiver is a conventional array used for direction finding (DF). The system performance analysis is carried out in terms of the Cramer-Rao bound of the mean-square error in estimating the target direction. It is shown that MIMO radar leads to significant performance improvement in DF accuracy.