Performance and complexity issues in noncoherent and coherent MIMO radar

Joint target position and velocity estimation is considered when a MIMO radar system employs either coherent or noncoherent processing and a suitable antenna placement for the processing employed. A theorem is presented for the case of orthogonal signals in temporally and spatially white noise-plus-clutter which shows that the MSE for the estimate of the noncoherent system approaches that of the coherent system as the product of the number of transmit and receive antennas is made sufficiently large. Numerical examples are also provided. Initially, we study systems without constraining the complexity and energy, where each added transmit antenna employs a fixed energy so that the total transmitted energy is allowed to increase as we increase the number of transmit antennas. Later we also look at constrained systems, where adding a transmit antenna splits the total system energy and the total number of antennas employed is restricted.