Detection performance of MIMO radar with correlated target scattering coefficient

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars use spatial diversity to improve the performance of the radar. For MIMO radar with widely separated antennas, target echo signals received by its widely separated antennas may be partially correlated. In this paper, we consider the effect of the correlation of the scattered signals on detection performance. This is achieved by using a finite number of small scatterers model for target. The detection performance of the distributed MIMO radar was analyzed under the Neyman-Pearson criterion when the target scattering set were not strictly independent of each other. We show that the PDF of test statistic is weighted chi-square distributed. An approximate closed form formula is derived to calculate the theoretical probability of detection for the distributed MIMO radar. The detection performance of the algorithm is verified via numerical results.