Target detection - Distributed radar sensor network (RSN) vs. MIMO-RSN

There has been an increasing investigation in distributed radar sensor network (RSN) and MIMO-RSN, including waveform design, antenna strategy and spacetime coding, etc. However, distributed-RSN and MIMO-RSN are more like two parallel paths other than one research field in current literature. In this paper, we address the comparison between distributed-RSN and MIMO-RSN for target detection. We first establish the wireless statistic channel model for them. Unlike the conventional models that assume the received signals are static plus a Gaussian random for simplicity and clarity, we believe it´s more genuine to model the received signals as random variables due to the uncertainty of channels. Choosing selection combination (SC) as a combining method of distributed-RSN, we get the receiver operation characteristic (ROC) evaluation of these two types through simulations. A comparative analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of them shows that target detection performance of distributed-RSN is better than that of MIMO-RSN when signal to noise ratio (SNR) is small and the probability of false alarm (P_fa) is lower. As both SNR and P_fa increase, the probability of target detection (P_d) of MIMO-RSN exceeds that of distributed-RSN.