Guest Editorial: special issue on bistatic and MIMO radars and their applications in surveillance and remote sensing

We are pleased to introduce this special issue on bistatic and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar, which represents a breakthrough in the use of radar technologies for surveillance and remote sensing. Bistatic radar includes passive radar (also reported as passive coherent location, PCL), which has become promising over the last decade within the aerospace and electronic systems community. The MIMO radar technologies are of two kinds, either coherent or non-coherent (also called statistical MIMO), depending on the way the phase of scattered signals among the different MIMO channels are processed (or not). Although coherent MIMO usually allows for improving the resolution, thanks to the additional degrees of freedom at the complex signal level, non-coherent MIMO usually refers to a multistatic space diversity benefiting from a data fusion scheme. This Special Issue outlines the link between MIMO and bistatic passive radar as the latter can be upgraded from using a multiple transmission configuration, hence taking benefit of both space and waveform diversities. Since the IET International Conference on Radar Systems, Radar 2012, held in Glasgow, UK, 22–25 October, a selection of topics has been identified for publication in this Special Issue. Besides the technical relevance of the papers, we would like to highlight the importance of the experimental validation, especially in the field of the MIMO radar, where the publications are mostly dominated by academic and theoretical papers.