Matched-Illumination Waveform Design for a Multistatic Through-the-Wall Radar System

We present the matched illumination waveform design for improved target detection in through-the-wall radar imaging and sensing applications. We consider a multistatic radar system for detection of stationary targets with known impulse responses behind walls. The stationary and slowly moving nature of typical indoor targets relaxes the orthogonality requirement on the waveforms, thereby allowing sequential transmissions from each transmitter with simultaneous reception at multiple receivers. The generalization of the matched illumination waveform design concept from a monostatic to a multistatic setting casts the indoor radar sensing problem in terms of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) operations and puts in context the offering of MIMO to urban sensing and imaging of targets in enclosed structures. Numerical electromagnetic modeling is used to provide the impulse response of typical behind-the-wall stationary targets, namely tables and humans, for different target orientations and at various incident and reflection angles. Simulation results depict an improvement in the signal-to-clutter-and-noise-ratio (SCNR) at the output of the matched filter receiver for multistatic radar as compared to monostatic operation.