Performance Evaluation of DDMA MIMO Radar Detection in the Presence of Correlated Clutter

The concept of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar is transmitting orthogonal waveforms to permit each receiver separating the signals from each transmitter. MIMO radar emits wide beam to observe a large area at once and to achieve a long illumination time, which can improve velocity and angle resolution and mitigate the clutter effects to improve drones' detection. This paper investigates the effect of different correlated clutter models on the Doppler Division Multiple Access (DDMA) MIMO radar. This model is designed to generate two waveforms: Linear Frequency Modulation (LFM), or Nonlinear Frequency Modulation (NLFM) radar waveforms. The results obtained in this paper show that NLFM MIMO radar waveform enhances the detection performance of DDMA MIMO radar more than LFM MIMO radar waveform in the presence of different correlated clutter models for small RCS targets (drones).