Target Location in Distributed MIMO radar based on Coherent Processing

In this paper, the problem of target location is investigated in the distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar based on coherent processing. At the modelling stage, the distributed MIMO radar is divided into three separated subarrays, where both transmit and receive functions are used in subarrays 1 and 3, while only receive function is adopted in subarray 2. Furthermore, a small frequency increment is introduced among different antenna elements in the subarray 1, in the meantime, a phase modulating operation is performed for various antenna elements in the subarray 3. In this respect, the target location performance can be improved significantly by means of the transmit modulation in subarrays 1 and 3. Under the circumstances, the model of target location is established, and a two-step estimation technology is shown, where a small location sector with respect to targets are firstly obtained, and the accurate location are further estimated. Specifically, in order to reduce the computational cost required by the multi-dimensional search procedures, an alternating procedure is developed by a sequence of 1-D searches obtained alternating between the optimization over each variable keeping the other fixed. Numerical results corroborate the effectiveness of the developed methods for the target location with distributed MIMO radar based on coherent processing.