MIMO-OFDM radar for direction estimation

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar makes use of orthogonal signals to obtain the phase delay for each transmitting/receiving antenna pair, and thus increasing the accuracy of direction estimation. The previously proposed MIMO radar assumes narrowband signals that guarantee the waveform orthogonality during the signals- transmission, propagation and reception. However, a narrowband system is unstable in target localisation because of the fluctuation of the target-s radar cross section. An MIMO-OFDM radar is proposed for target localisation. It adopts the OFDM technique to simultaneously transmit and receive a set of multiple narrowband orthogonal signals at orthogonal frequencies. A practical model accommodating a physical target is presented to simulate the MIMO-OFDM radar. As an example, a composite target composed of five infinite dielectric cylinders is localised by a four-element uniform linear array. The performance of the MIMO-OFDM radar is investigated by examining the estimation error for different numbers of sub-bands, different signal-to-noise ratios and different target directions. It is demonstrated by simulation that the MIMO-OFDM radar gives more statistically stable estimation by spreading the signal power over a wider spectrum.