A Novel Two-stage Space-time Adaptive Processing Method for Airborne MIMO Radar

Airborne MIMO radar uses its temporal freedom and receiving transmitting spatial freedom to suppress clutter, while it nulls jammers by only receiving spatial freedom. Based on these characteristic, a novel two-stage method is presented in this paper, which separates suppression of clutter and jammers into two sequential stages. First, jammers are nulled with partial receiving freedom, and dimension reduction is also implemented. Second, matched-filtering is applied to the output data after jammer suppression, followed by clutter suppression using temporal and spatial freedom. Through the two-stage processing, transmitting spatial freedom can be fully utilized in clutter suppression together with reducing the computational load and sample requirement effectively. Both theoretic analysis and simulation experiments present that，in the presence of strong jammers, performance of the proposal can approach to that of the full dimension space-time adaptive processing for MIMO radar.