Optimal code design for MIMO radar — Optimal receivers

This paper addresses the problem of transmitter design for a single target MIMO radar system. The transmitted space-time codes are unitary apart from the inclusion of a transmit beamformer. The paper demonstrates that the use of unitary codes leads to a simple coherent correlations-based maximum-likelihood receiver yielding unbiased estimates of the target range and wavenumber, and their time derivatives. The transmitter codes are chosen to maximise the Fisher information for the model. This leads to an alternating projection gradient adaptive algorithm for dynamic code design. The paper argues that proper choice of beamformer phases can lead to efficient estimators, thus validating the optimisation methodology.