MIMO Radar Moving Target Detection in Homogeneous Clutter

A multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar approach employing widely dispersed transmit and receive antennas is studied for the detection of moving targets. The MIMO radar transmits orthogonal waveforms from the different transmit antennas so these waveforms can be separated at each receive antenna. For a moving target in colored Gaussian noise-plus-clutter, we quantify the gains from having widely dispersed antennas that allow the overall system to "view" the target simultaneously from several different directions. The MIMO radar performance is contrasted with that of a traditional phased-array approach, which employs closely spaced antennas for this purpose. The MIMO radar approach is well suited to handle targets that have small radial velocities for scenarios in which colocated sensors cannot separate the target from the background clutter. Both a centralized processing and a simple distributed processing form of the MIMO radar approach are developed and studied, and the gains from the centralized version, which come at the price of additional complexity, are clearly demonstrated and explained intuitively. The constant false alarm rate (CFAR) property of an adaptive version of the MIMO moving target detector is also demonstrated for homogeneous clutter.