Feasibility Study of Employing MIMO SFCW Radar Using Doppler Division Multiple Access

Multiple input multiple output(MIMO) radar systems have seen considerable use due to their ability to simulate a large antenna array with few physical antenna elements. The performance of microwave sensors can benefit greatly from MIMO techniques. This paper presents a simulation study to determine the feasibility of MIMO radars leveraging the stepped-frequency continuous wave(SFCW) transmit scheme and investigates the possibility of utilizing Doppler division multiple access(DDMA) for MIMO SFCW radar. Although DDMA is a well-known slow-time phase coding method to synthesize frequency division and generate orthogonal MIMO waveforms, it has not been leveraged in the context of SFCW radar. Therefore, this paper compares SFCW with the more common frequency modulated continuous wave(FMCW) technique to compare the merits and demerits of each transmit scheme. A MATLAB simulation is presented to analyze the possibility of DDMA SFCW radars.