Impact of channel imbalances on beamforming performance in Automotive MIMO Radar

Every radar system suffers channel errors which lead to degraded angle estimation performance. This paper describes a novel modelling technique for conventional beamformer angle estimation performance under MIMO channel imbalances. To evaluate the beamformer performance three metrics are used: angle estimation accuracy, sidelobe level (SLL) and resolution. Based on this performance metrics several uniform linear arrays (ULAs) as well as one non-uniform linear array (NULA) are compared in simulation for single and two target scenarios. The measurement and simulation results of an λ
0
/2 ULA and an NULA confirm the accurate prediction of error bounds by the proposed model.