Noncoherent versus coherent MIMO radar: Performance and simplicity analysis

MIMO radar with properly placed antennas that employs a coherent processing approach can provide superior MSE performance, as indicated by recent work. This paper demonstrates that the magnitude of these gains decreases with an increase in the product of the number of transmit and receive antennas if the antennas for the noncoherent system are also suitably placed, using a placement which is generally different from the one for the coherent processing approach. Initially, we study the systems without constraining the complexity and energy, where each added transmit antenna employs a fixed energy so that the total transmitted energy is allowed to increase as we increase the number of transmit antennas. Later we also look at constrained systems, where adding a transmit antenna splits the total system energy and the total number of antennas employed is restricted. A rigorous theorem is presented for the case of orthogonal signals in temporally and spatially white clutter-plus-noise, but numerical results for nonorthogonal signals and colored clutter-plus-noise follow a similar pattern.