Clutter Rank Analysis in Airborne FDA-MIMO Radar With Range Ambiguity

Frequency diverse array (FDA), which employs a small frequency increment across its array elements to generate controllable degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) in range dimension, has attracted extensive attentions in recent years. In order to extract and exploit the DOFs in range and angle dimensions, FDA has been combined with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique, which shows sufficient performance improvement in clutter suppression in scenarios with range ambiguities. Therefore, clutter rank evaluation is an important issue for FDA-MIMO radar mounted on a moving platform. In this article, a clutter rank evaluation criterion is developed with respect to different transmit/receive array configurations and different number of range ambiguities. It is based on a subspace transformation matrix that decouples the clutter subspace and allows a direct determination of clutter rank. With the proposed clutter rank evaluation criterion, the maximum resolvable number of range ambiguities can be determined, which is bounded by the system’s DOFs. Three cases according to different relationships between uniform array element spacings are studied. Then, the aforementioned clutter rank evaluation method is extended to nonuniform array configurations. Moreover, the robustness of the method is studied in the presence of gain-phase errors. Several simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.