Antenna processing optimization for a colocated MIMO radar

In a practical colocated MIMO radar design case, there will often not be a free choice of locations for single element antennas. Antenna parts may be available as rectangular arrays of antenna elements located on tiles, and multiple TX/RX modules may be assembled on TX/RX boards to be attached to the antenna tiles from the backside. The first part of the paper focuses on optimum attachment of transmit/receive modules to antenna tiles for a non-adaptive MIMO radar. The main lobe width and the maximum side lobe level have been minimized using genetic algorithms (GA). In the second part of the paper, transmit beamforming has been optimized using semidefinite relaxation with 4 orthogonal beams from the optimized array antenna. The antenna and processing performance using 64 active TX/RX channels have been compared to a conventional 256 elements array antenna.