Joint DOD and DOA Estimation for Coherently Distributed Sources in Bistatic MIMO Radar Based on Joint Diagonalization

In this paper, an efficient method via unitary joint diagonalization is proposed to deal with the coherently distributed sources in bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems. In order to determine the direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) of the coherently distributed source, a special array configuration is designed both for transmitter and receiver in bistatic MIMO radar system. Then, a new signal model can be obtained by utilizing the designed array characteristic and the rotational invariance relationship is constructed both for DOD and DOA. For the special rotational invariance relationship, the joint diagonalization technique is adopted to locate the coherently distributed sources and the angular parameters are automatically paired without multidimensional search process. The proposed joint diagonalization method can also determine the targets when multiple imping sources have the common DODs or DOAs. Finally, the approximate determined Cramer-Rao bound of the proposed estimator for the coherently distributed sources is also derived. And, additional numerical results are conducted to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.