Virtual Transmitting-Receiving Beamforming Approach to Achieving Narrower Mainlobe for MIMO Radar by Tapering

An innovative approach is introduced to form narrower mainlobe of virtual transmitting-receiving beamforming by transmitting orthogonal coding waveforms from the antenna elements and digitally processing of their echoes at the receiver. The benefits such as increased angle resolution and increased Doppler resolution of MIMO radar mainly depend on the sparse arrays without the adverse effects of sidelobes. However, due to the actual limitation, such as room limitation for airborne, cost or other factors, we have to set the array in dense arrays configuration. With the proposed amplitude taper approach, a narrower main beam can be achieved with dense arrays configuration after virtual transmitting-receiving beamforming which can improve the performance of detecting slow moving target. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss of tapering is also discussed.

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