Hybrid Phased MIMO Radar With Unequal Subarrays

Phased multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) radar has been proposed in the recent years to exploit the coherent processing gain of phased array radar and the waveform diversity of the MIMO radar. The transmit array is divided into subarrays of equal length to show some improvements as compared to both phased array and MIMO radar alone. In this letter, a hybrid phased MIMO radar with unequal subarrays has been proposed to steer multiple beams of different gain and unique waveforms towards a particular target. The unequal size and greater length of subarrays give an extra degree of freedom by illuminating the small targets with more focused beams. As a result, the echoes received by the receiver provide better information about the target. The effectiveness of proposed scheme is shown through simulation results.