MIMO radar ambiguity analysis of frequency hopping pulse waveforms

Radar systems employing multiple transmit antennas and multiple receive antennas have received great interest over the last decade. While single-input multiple-output (SIMO) radar systems employ only spatial diversity, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars employ both spatial and waveform diversity to improve the system performance. Waveform design for MIMO radars involves optimization of desired delay, Doppler and spatial resolution characteristics. Designs of frequency hopping waveforms that optimize the MIMO radar ambiguity function under small and large Doppler scenarios were recently proposed. These waveforms are obtained by optimizing an appropriately formulated cost function using modified simulated annealing algorithms. In this paper, the MIMO radar ambiguity properties of large sets of frequency hopping waveforms based on algebraic theory are analyzed and their relative performance are compared.