A Space-Time Coding Scheme With Time and Frequency Comb-Like Chirp Waveforms for MIMO-SAR

A new space-time coding (STC) scheme for multiple-input multiple-output synthetic aperture radar systems is proposed in this paper. In the new scheme, two successive signal periods are put into one transmit duration to minimize the time-variant channel effect. The even and odd components of the transmitted waveforms are modulated into distinct Doppler frequencies in the azimuth direction and can be separated by bandpass filter in the range-Doppler domain. The presented STC scheme can suppress the interchannel ambiguous energy caused by the time-variant channel responses, which typically occur in conventional STC schemes, and increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the echoes by a decoding matrix. To further suppress the interference, a waveform called time and frequency comb-like chirp (TFCC) is proposed. With the application of the complementary comb-like structure in the time and frequency domains, two TFCC waveforms are short-term shift-orthogonal and constant envelope. Moreover, these corresponding TFCC waveforms can share the same antenna and time gate without sacrificing any TFCC waveforms' peak level. The theoretical analysis and simulation results illustrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.