Sparse array design for MIMO radar in multipath scenarios

Abstract: Sparse array designs have focused mostly on angular resolution, peak sidelobe level and directivity factor of virtual arrays for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. The notion of the MIMO radar virtual array is based on the direct path assumption in that the direction-of-departure (DOD) and direction-of-arrival (DOA) of the targets are equal. However, the DOD and DOA of targets in multipath scenarios are likely to be very different. The identification of multipath targets requires DOD-DOA imaging using the the transmit and receive arrays, not the virtual array. To improve the imaging of both direct path and multipath targets, we introduce several new criteria for MIMO radar sparse linear array (SLA) designs for multipath scenarios. Under the new criteria, we adopt a cyclic optimization strategy under a coordinate descent framework to design the MIMO SLAs. We present several numerical examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.