Software-Defined Millimeter-Wave Multistatic Radar With Space-Time-Coded Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing

High-performance millimeter-wave (mm-wave) multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) radars have been using efficient multiplexing with increasingly complicated radar waveforms, where conventional hardware architectures suffer from inevitably high design complexity and cost. This article presents a new software-defined mm-wave multistatic imaging system which provides great efficiency and flexibility to generate and process complicated radar waveforms. A general system block diagram and its signal model are proposed to use space-time-coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) for simultaneous MIMO transmission at the same time and frequency. The space-time coding (STC) is designed based on the Hadamard matrix which allows simple decoupling and decoding for imaging processing. A radar prototype is designed to validate the proposed system architecture, which operates at 83.5 GHz with a frequency bandwidth of 4.8 GHz. The mm-wave front-end consists of a metal-printed 8-by-8 waveguide array with a small element-separation of 9 mm to form 64 virtual channels for three-dimensional imaging. Experimental results show good imaging performance, giving great potential to design future cost-effective high-performance mm-wave imaging with efficient multiplexing.