Propagator method for angle estimation of non-circular sources in bistatic MIMO radar

In this paper, the bistatic Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar with non-circular signals is considered, and a propagator method for joint direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is proposed. Owing to the properties of non-circular signals, a new virtual array whose elements are twice as many as MIMO virtual array is formed. In order to avoid the EVD (Eigenvalue Decomposition) or SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) of the covariance matrix, the propagator method is applied to estimate the signal subspace. Then the rotational invariance properties of the new virtual array are figured out, and the DODs and DOAs can be estimated through ESPRIT. The DODs and DOAs are paired automatically without the additional pairing computation. Compared with the ESPRIT and ESPRIT-MUSIC method in MIMO radar, the proposed method is able to provide better angle estimation performance and handle more targets. Some simulation results are used to verify the performance of the proposed method.