MIMO beamforming and error analysis

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) processing is used in radar systems to improve performance. When forming MIMO beams, the receive weighting function must take into account not only the receive element location but each transmit phase center location as well. This leads to more complex beamforming process and weight calculation. The beamforming process that takes into account transmit and receive phase centers has an added benefit where beam pointing errors due to elemental magnitude and phase errors are reduced. This paper discusses the benefits of MIMO, the calculation of proper weights for use in the beamforming process, and the reduced system level errors that result from beamforming in this manner.