MIMO radar, SIMO radar, and IFIR radar: a comparison

This paper focuses on a simple beamforming problem and compares the MIMO and SIMO radar systems for the case where the transmitter and receiver are collocated. The simplicity of the application allows one to see clearly where the advantages of MIMO radar come from, and what the tradeoffs are. The comparison also includes a third system called the IFIR radar (interpolated FIR radar). The MIMO radar offers advantages in terms of clutter reduction, especially when the extra coherent integration time can be exploited, but it does not offer an SNR advantage - in fact the SNR is worse than that of the SIMO radar when extra integration cannot be performed. The IFIR radar, which is essentially a simple variation of phased array radars, has an advantage over the SIMO radar in terms of clutter reduction, and does not compromise SNR in order to achieve this. The multiple orthogonal waveforms used in MIMO radar typically require extra bandwidth for fixed range resolution but the IFIR radar does not require extra bandwidth.