A new pattern of MIMO radar GMTI

Utilizing digital beam forming (DBF) on transmit and receive, the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar can be applied to ground moving target indication (GMTI) and can provide an efficient way to improve the GMTI performance. The operating pattern is very significant for the MIMO radar GMTI. For the traditional GMTI pattern, there is a conflict of the wider swath and narrower clutter bandwidth. The observation area can be broadened with MIMO techniques by scanning. This paper designs an effective pattern with the simultaneous transmission of multi-phase-centre multi-sub-band signals as well as beam scanning in each pulse, which provide an efficient way to settle the conflict. By beam scanning in pulse, the new pattern has wider azimuth swath, shorter revisiting period, larger coherent processing interval (CPI) number and higher SCNR. By MIMO technology, more equivalent phase centres and longer efficient baselines can be formed, so the performance of GMTI can be improved. The principle of space-time-frequency adaptive processing (STFAP) is analysed, simulation results are presented to prove the superiority of MIMO radar in clutter suppression and GMTI. Analysis of the results indicates improved detection performance with the new pattern compared to the conventional approach.