Polarimetric MIMO Radar With Distributed Antennas for Target Detection

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems with widely separated antennas enable viewing the target from different angles, thereby providing spatial diversity gain. Polarimetric design of the transmit waveforms based on the properties of the target scattering matrix provides better performance than transmitting waveforms with only fixed horizontal or vertical polarizations. We propose a radar system that combines the advantages of both systems by transmitting polarized waveforms from multiple distributed antennas, in order to detect a point-like stationary target. The proposed system employs 2-D vector sensors at the receivers, each of which measures the horizontal and vertical components of the received electric field separately. We design the Neyman-Pearson detector for such systems. We derive approximate expressions for the probability of false alarm (P
_FA
) and the probability of detection (P
_D
). Using numerical simulations, we demonstrate that optimal design of the antenna polarizations provides improved performance over MIMO systems that transmit waveforms of fixed polarizations over all the antennas. We also demonstrate that having multiple widely separated antennas gives improved performance over single-input-single-output (SISO) polarimetric radar. We also demonstrate that processing the vector measurements at each receiver separately gives improved performance over systems that linearly combine both the received signals to give scalar measurements.