Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Enhanced Target Detection in MIMO Radar

Motivated by the improved capacity and energy performance by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in multiinput-multioutput (MIMO) communication systems, we apply the IRS in the colocated MIMO radar systems to increase the received power and improve the target detection performance. To deal with this, we introduce an IRS-assisted target detection algorithm, in which the reflection optimization with practical IRS model is carried out, and then the optimal beamforming for target detection is proposed. Meanwhile, the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) of the proposed method shows the effectiveness of utilizing the IRS in MIMO radar systems. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed method can achieve better target detection performance. With the increased number of elements in the IRS, the proposed method has better angle resolution and detection probability compared with a non-IRS-assisted MIMO radar system.