MIMO SAR techniques and trades

A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system utilizing multiple-receive and multiple-transmit channels (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output: MIMO) is commonly referred to as MIMO SAR. The trade-space for such a system includes the instrument and antenna parameters taking into consideration the digital beamforming techniques described through the operation modes of the radar. The purpose of exploring this trade-space is to improve and optimize the performance of the system, described through the performance parameters. In this paper we first introduce digital beamforming operation modes for SAR exploiting multiple channels. Then we explain the multi-dimensional trade-space in terms of a set of parameters. Based on an example MIMO SAR system we show that there are new and unexpected ways of trading the system and performance parameters versus each other.