Characterizing the Effects of Mixed Division Waveform Schemes in MIMO Radar

Abstract

Direction of departure estimation in Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar is based on transmitting a set of orthogonal (or at least separable) waveforms, one per transmit element. Assuming orthogonality is preserved, these waveforms can then be separated into different channels at the receiver before beamforming. In practice, however, MIMO waveforms are not perfectly orthogonal, and at different points in the processing chain, this can manifest as phase errors in the steering manifolds used in beamforming. Furthermore, due to resource constraints, either by the channel or the sensing scenario, a mixture of orthogonality techniques, mixed division strategies, are often employed, resulting in further phase errors. Naturally, such errors will interfere in the beamforming process, spoiling the beam, introducing direction finding errors, or increasing sidelobe levels, and consequently reducing SNR. In this paper, we demonstrate how mixing division strategies significantly degrades orthogonality of otherwise orthogonal waveforms resulting in degraded beamforming performance. Specifically, we show that waveforms which exhibit favourable sidelobe levels may still induce large direction of departure errors and vice versa. Additionally, through multiple exhaustive searches of potential mixed division strategies with combinations of time-, Doppler- and code-based division techniques we show that large numbers of the possible waveforms exhibit poor beamforming qualities.