Minimum Redundancy MIMO Array Synthesis by means of Cyclic Difference Sets

Antenna array synthesis is an important issue in MIMO radars. By judiciously designing antenna positions, one can create a very long virtual array steering vector with a small number of antennas and therefore achieve very high spatial resolution at a small cost. This paper presents a combinatorial methodology based on cyclic difference sets (CDSs) for minimum redundancy (MR) MIMO array synthesis which seeks to maximize the virtual array aperture for a given number of antennas. First, the key features of CDSs and the CDS-based MR-MIMO layouts are described. Then, the analytical expression of the maximum contiguous virtual array aperture is derived. Further, based on this expression, an enumerative shifting procedure is developed for identifying the optimal CDS-based MR-MIMO layout. Selected examples are analyzed to point out the computational effectiveness of the CDS-based MR-MIMO array synthesis.