Widely distributed MIMO radar beamforming for detecting targets with slow RCS fluctuations

In a widely distributed MIMO radar, the transmitters and the receivers are distributed so that they see a target from different aspects. The scattering from the target is therefore different for each transmitter-receiver pair. It is commonly assumed that a set of orthogonal waveforms are transmitted and the scattered waveforms are then separated using a matched filter to achieve diversity. In this paper, we propose a beamforming method for the widely distributed MIMO radar. Orthogonal waveforms are used initially for probing the target, i.e. to obtain information about the the target and the channel and a single waveform is then transmitted so that the SNR in the receivers is increased. Numerical simulations demonstrate that this will increase the probability of detecting the target.