Non-coherent MIMO radar in a non-Gaussian noise-plus-clutter environment

The initial papers on MIMO radar have triggered a tremendous amount of research work recently. How the MIMO radar detector, previously designed for Gaussian noise, performs when the noise-plus-clutter is non-Gaussian is still unknown. In this paper, we evaluate the detection performance of the Gaussian detector under the non-Gaussian noise-plus-clutter in a non-coherent MIMO radar system. Using the theory of Spherically Invariant Random Vectors (SIRVs), we study three non-Gaussian noise-plus-clutter models employing the K, Laplace, and Student-T distributions, respectively. Simulations are carried out for different numbers of antennas, SNRs and false alarm probabilities. The results show that non-Gaussian noise-plus-clutter has no impact on the diversity gain of a MIMO radar system although it degrades the detection performance in some other ways. We also verify some known results on the optimality of the Gaussian detector for SIRV noise-plus-clutter models, while showing this is not true for non-SIRV models.