Beamforming in MIMO Radar

Abstract

Radar is a system of transmitters and receivers that can detect, locate and measure the speed of a target using electromagnetic waves. Radar perform many other tasks such as geo sensing, terrain mapping and air traffic control. MIMO radars represent a new generation of radars. In contrast to the traditional phased-array radar in which the transmit elements can transmit only the scaled versions of same signal, a MIMO radar allows the transmitters to transmit multiple signals. This waveform diversity offers enhanced flexibility in transmit beampattern synthesis which is an important area of MIMO radar signal processing. In this thesis study, we provide an overview of MIMO radar and the advantages it offers as compared to its phased array counterpart. We discuss transmit beamforming in MIMO radar and develop the signal model for it. Algorithms for transmit beamforming are discussed. In this paper we propose two algorithms where we use convex optimization to optimize the signal covariance matrix.