Transmit Beampattern Synthesis And Signal Coding Methods For MIMO Radar Systems

MIMO radar is a new radar technique developed recently, and one of the main research directions for the next generation radar. By exploiting spatial diversity, waveform diversity and other new technologies, MIMO radar can obtain higher probability of target detection and better parameter estimation performance than the traditional phased array radar.The thesis describes MIMO radar concept and its principle, analyzes the degree of freedom and introduces some adaptive techniques in MIMO radar system. The waveform optimization is mainly researched in this thesis. Several waveform design methods are briefly given. The Beampattern-matching design is introduced in detail, which uses a convex optimization algorithm to choose the signal correlation matrix. The objective of this method is to obtain a beampattern which matches the desired spatial transmit beampattern approximately. The thesis analyzes several means to estimate the signal correlation matrix. On the basis of the correlation matrix, the transmit waveform can be obtained by cyclic algorithm or a code design method for BPSK(Binary phase-shift keyed) in the viewpoint of probability theory. An improvement step is also presented in this section. Finally the thesis discusses the parameter estimation performances using several aforementioned waveforms. The simulation results indicate that the optimized waveforms have better parameter estimation performances.