Joint Radar Target Detection and Parameter Estimation with MIMO OTFS

Motivated by future automotive applications, we study the joint target detection and parameter estimation problem using orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS), a digital modulation format robust to time-frequency selective channels. Assuming the transmitter is equipped with a mono-static MIMO radar, we propose an efficient maximum likelihood based approach to detect targets and estimate the corresponding delay, Doppler, and angle-of-arrival parameters. In order to reduce the computational complexity associated to the high-dimensional search, our scheme proceeds in two steps, i.e., target detection and coarse parameter estimation followed by refined parameter estimation. Interestingly, our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is able to identify multiple targets if they are separated in at least one domain out of three (delay, Doppler, and angle), while achieving the Cramér-Rao lower bound for the parameter estimation.