In-Field Demonstration of a Photonic Coherent MIMO Distributed Radar Network

This paper reports an in-field experiment of a photonics-based coherent MIMO radar network. The use of photonics guarantees the coherence of the transmitted and received RF signals, and allows remoting the antennas exploiting deployed optical fibers, thus a MIMO approach can be applied on a network of widely distributed coherent radars. In the in-field experiment, a photonics-based radar core connects two transmitters and two receivers, with 100-MHz bandwidth signals in X-band, observing a collaborative target. The results demonstrate an improvement in radar precision, and envisage real applications wherever fiber is available for deploying the radar network.