MIMO radar topology: A systematic approach to the placement of the antennas

Interest in MIMO radars has been growing lately because they keep performance close to a conventional antenna array, but make it possible, at the same time, to take advantage of several hardware benefits. There are a number of publications on the performance of MIMO radar systems so that their advantages/disadvantages against conventional electronic steered arrays have been investigated in details. However, no publications focus on the way of synthesizing an arbitrary array through appropriate transmit and receive arrays. Consequently this paper describes a method to find all the possible decompositions of an arbitrary linear antenna array into transmit and receive arrays employing the MIMO radar technique. In particular, this is achieved through a polynomial approach to array decomposition.