MIMO Situational Awareness Radar
Jeffrey Krolik


This work addresses the problem of radar surveillance in environments where multipath and non-line-of-sight propagation limit the effectiveness of conventional systems. Complex propagation is prevalent in applications as diverse as automotive radar, indoor radar, and over-the-horizon radar. For ground-moving target indication (GMTI) radar, multipath propagation can result in target masking by Doppler-spread ground clutter which cannot be mitigated by conventional space-time adaptive processing. For synthetic aperture radar (SAR), non-line-of-sight propagation can cause troubling image artifacts. In this paper, we discuss how MIMO space-time processing can be used to improve both GMTI and SAR situational awareness from a moving vehicle. The unique MIMO radar capability of discriminating both radar signal direction-of-arrival and direction-of-departure as a function of time delay is shown to be critical for situational awareness in complex environments. In addition to simulation results, a real-time testbed radar demonstration will be presented.