Centralized and distributed tests for moving target detection with MIMO radars in clutter of non-homogeneous power

In this paper, we study moving target detection (MTD) using a distributed MIMO radar, where the multi-static transmit-receive configuration causes non-homogeneous clutter. By representing the non-homogeneous clutter in a low-rank subspace with different subspace coefficients for different transmit-receive pairs, we first propose a centralized detector, the MIMO generalized likelihood ratio test (MIMO-GLRT), which requires the distributed receivers to send all their local observations to a fusion center. To reduce the communication overhead as well as power/bandwidth consumptions from the receivers to the fusion center, we consider two distributed implementations of the MIMO-GLRT, with or without local data aggregation. In both cases, the local unquantized test statistics from all distributed receivers are forwarded to the fusion center. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance loss with respect to the centralized MIMO-GLRT and compare the proposed detectors with another distributed MIMO moving target detector based on a homogeneous assumption.