Joint Design of Sparse Array Sparse Pulse Train and STAP for MIMO Radar with Co-Located Antennas

In this paper, maximizing the output signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio (SCNR) is considered for multiple-input multiple-out (MIMO) radar with co-located antennas to improve the detection performance in clutter environment. Normally, increasing the number of antennas and transmitted pulses is helpful in increasing the SCNR. However, real applications may place constraints on the system complexity, so that only a limited number of antennas and pulses can be employed. To improve the system performance with limited complexity, sparse array and sparse pulse train is usually adopted. To improve the output SCNR, we implement space-time adaptive processing (STAP) to suppress clutter, and further propose to jointly optimize the space-time weighting factors and the antenna and pulse locations of the sparse array and sparse pulse train. It is shown that the proposed method can give superior performance.