Concurrent exploration of MIMO radar and co-prime array for faster and higher resolution scanning

There are a lot of recent research interests on MIMO radars. Transmitting orthogonal waveforms, the extra degrees of freedom (DoFs) provided by MIMO radar can increase the detection and estimation performance. Besides, the recent work on nested array and co-prime array also bring encouraging results. But whether these two ideas can be employed together remains an open problem. In this work, we investigate the potential benefit of using the two techniques together. Our analysis indicates that the use of the two techniques can speed up the scanning process. Compared to conventional Uniform Linear Array (ULA), our performance studies through simulations further demonstrate the use of co-prime scanning can significantly improve the detection probability and resolution, and reduce the number of antennas needed for a given number of targets.