Extended-aperture Mulit-target Location Algorithm for MIMO Radars with Vector Sensors

A multi-target location algorithm is proposed for MIMO radar with extended-aperture array of electromagnetic vector sensors. A novel bistatic MIMO radar system with multiple transmit sensors and multiple receive electromagnetic vectors is introduced, and receive element spacing is greater than half-wavelength. The ESPRIT method is employed to extract a set of high accurate but ambiguous Direction Of Arrive (DOA), then the low accurate but unambiguous estimates which are obtained utilizing the internal structure feature of the vector sensors and subspace rotation invariance are used to disambiguate the ambiguous DOA to yield high accurate and unambiguous DOA. One-dimensional MUSIC method is employed to get the Departure Of Direction (DOD) estimates with the known DOA. The algorithm improves greatly the accuracy of MIMO radar location, requires no two-dimensional searches and parameter pairing, thus showing low computational complexity. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and the estimation accuracy is close to the Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB).