Computationally efficient DOD and DOA estimation for bistatic MIMO radar with propagator method

In this article, we consider a computationally efficient direction of departure and direction of arrival estimation problem for a bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. The computational loads of the propagator method (PM) can be significantly smaller since the PM does not require any eigenvalue decomposition of the cross correlation matrix and singular value decomposition of the received data. An improved PM algorithm is proposed to obtain automatically paired transmit and receive angle estimations in the MIMO radar. The proposed algorithm has very close angle estimation performance to conventional PM, which has a much higher complexity than our algorithm. For high signal-to-noise ratio, the proposed algorithm has very close angle estimation to estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique algorithm. The variance of the estimation error and Cramér–Rao bound of angle estimation are derived. Simulation results verify the usefulness of our algorithm.