Antenna and pulse selection for colocated MIMO radar

Abstract

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar is known for its superiority over conventional radar due to its antenna and waveform diversity. However, the increased hardware cost (due to multiple transmitters and receivers), power consumption (due to multiple transmitters and pulses), and computational complexity (due to numerous pulses) form the drawbacks of MIMO radar. On one hand, a higher estimation accuracy is required, but on the other hand, a lower number of active antennas/pulses is desirable. Therefore, in this paper, by proposing a convex optimization approach for the general case of transmitter-receiver-pulse selection, we will minimize the total number of active antennas/pulses in order to guarantee a prescribed performance accuracy. The performance measure we will optimize is the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the angle and velocity estimation accuracy of two targets, which provides a trade-off between the main beamwidth and the sidelobe level (SLL) of the ambiguity function.