Phased-MIMO Radar: A Tradeoff Between Phased-Array and MIMO Radars

We propose a new technique for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar with colocated antennas which we call phased-MIMO radar. The new technique enjoys the advantages of the MIMO radar without sacrificing the main advantage of the phased-array radar which is the coherent processing gain at the transmitting side. The essence of the proposed technique is to partition the transmit array into a number of subarrays that are allowed to overlap. Then, each subarray is used to coherently transmit a waveform which is orthogonal to the waveforms transmitted by other subarrays. Coherent processing gain can be achieved by designing a weight vector for each subarray to form a beam towards a certain direction in space. Moreover, the subarrays are combined jointly to form a MIMO radar resulting in higher angular resolution capabilities. Substantial improvements offered by the proposed phased-MIMO radar technique as compared to the phased-array and MIMO radar techniques are demonstrated analytically and by simulations through analyzing the corresponding beam patterns and the achievable output signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratios. Both analytical and simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed phased-MIMO radar.