Target detection in MIMO radar using Golay complementary sequences in the presence of Doppler

In this paper, we present a method for detecting a point target using multiple antennas when the relative motion between the receivers and the target induces a non-negligible Doppler shift. As a key illustrative example, we consider a 4 × 4 system employing a unitary matrix waveform set, e.g., formed from Golay complementary sequences. When a non-negligible Doppler shift is induced by the target motion, the waveform matrix formed from the complementary sequences is no longer unitary, resulting in significantly degraded target range estimates. To solve this problem, we adopt a subspace based approach exploiting the observation that the receive matrix formed from matched filtering of the reflected waveforms has a (non-trivial) null-space. Through processing of the waveforms with the appropriate vector from the null-space, we can significantly improve the detection performance. We provide simulation results to confirm the theoretical analysis.