Effects of transmitting correlated waveforms for co-located multi-input multi-output radar with target detection and localisation

Space time coding plays quite an important role in the design of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar. It has been shown that the correlation characteristics of waveform set have a great impact on the performance of target detection and localisation for MIMO radar. In this study, the target detection and localisation performance of co-located MIMO radar is analysed theoretically and experimentally, when correlated (not ideally orthogonal or fully coherent) waveforms are transmitted. The relationship between transmit–receive beam pattern improvement and correlation coefficients of transmitted waveforms is investigated. The signal to interference and noise ratio varying with correlation coefficients in range-Doppler matched processing is defined and analysed. Furthermore, Cramer–Rao bound for target direction of arrival estimation and target detection probability in the Neyman–Pearson criteria are derived when transmitting correlated waveforms. It is shown that the MIMO radar detection and localisation performance is much dependent with the correlation level of transmitted waveforms, which can be quite useful for MIMO radar orthogonal waveform design. Numerical simulation validates the theoretical analysis.