A Study on the Application of Subarrayed Time-Modulated Arrays to MIMO Radar

A novel application of time-modulated arrays to multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar is presented and studied. The proposed scheme is to partition the transmit antenna of MIMO radar to a number of time-modulated subarrays that are overlapped. A series of orthogonal waveforms are emitted by these time-modulated subarrays with the unidirectional phase center motion time scheme. The resulting system can be referred to as subarrayed time-modulated MIMO (STM-MIMO) radar. As the tradeoff of conventional phased-array and MIMO radars, the STM-MIMO radar can obtain the coherent processing gain and waveform diversity gain simultaneously. The performance in terms of output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and transmit/receive beampattern for the STM-MIMO radar is highlighted and compared to that of phased-array and MIMO radars. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed STM-MIMO radar technique.