Combined transmitter selection and pulse precoding for MIMO radar systems

This paper presents a pulse precoding technique combined with antenna selection for widely distributed MIMO radar systems. The scheme selects a subset of antennas for transmission and jointly linearly coded pulses are emit in order to offer a MIMO system making maximum usage of any available information. The selection and coding procedure is constructed on slowly time-varying statistical radar knowledge such as antenna correlation and stationary / line-of-sight scatterers. Transmitting pulses from a few selected antennas ensures that signals are only emit from the most viable emitters while pulse coding introduces additional information-limited beamforming gain. Simulations are used to demonstrate that combining these techniques can offer substantial advantages.