Transmit Beamspace Design for Bistatic MIMO Radar With Improved Angle Estimation

The energy dispersion of traditional bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar severely degrades the angle estimation performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose to design the transmit beamspace matrix and apply the design result to jointly estimate the target directions of departure (DOD) and directions of arrival (DOA). The essence of this method is to minimize the distance between a desired transmit steering vector and the actual one within a given angular sector. Moreover, we enforce two inequality constraints to achieve approximately uniform power distribution across the transmit array elements. In addition, we carefully devise the desired transmit steering vector to expand the virtual transmit aperture and further improve the DOD estimation performance. Furthermore, we use tensor-decomposition and a phase-searching method to estimate the target DODs and DOAs. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.