Antenna beam patterns in MIMO radar

This paper deals with the development of an appropriate multistatic or multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar ambiguity function. Earlier work analyzed the case of isotropic antennas; in this work, we show how to include antenna beam patterns into the model. We consider the case of fixed sensors and a general distribution of objects, each undergoing linear motion; thus the theory deals with imaging distributions in phase space. We outline the derivation for a model for the data that is appropriate for narrowband waveforms in the case when the targets are moving slowly relative to the speed of light. From this model, we develop a phase-space imaging formula that can be interpreted in terms of filtered backprojection or matched filtering. For this imaging approach, we derive the corresponding phase-space ambiguity function or point-spread function. We show plots of the phase-space ambiguity function for various geometries.