A novel receiver architecture for spread spectrum MIMO-radar systems

This paper presents a novel and patented receiver design for spread spectrum MIMO-radar systems that enables scalability to high numbers of transmitters and receivers. The proposed technique, known from MIMO-communications, is based on the concept of successive interference cancellation where the signal component for each transmitter, characterized by amplitude and time-of-arrival, is retrieved in time-domain from a signal mixture at the receiver. Hence, it is possible to obtain a sparse representation of the original radar signal. Contrary to conventional matched filters, absolute amplitude information become available for radar signal processing. This approach benefits from recent advances in orthogonal waveform design, supports arbitrary transmitter-receiver constellations (collocated or distributed) and zero sidelobes with optimal range resolution for maximum image quality.