Detection and characterization of MIMO radar signals

Motivated by electronic surveillance applications, this paper considers the problems of detecting the presence of and characterizing a radar transmitter using data collected at a spatially distributed suite of receivers. A characterization of particular interest is determining the rank of the transmitted signal, which enables discrimination between MIMO and conventional radar transmitters as well as distinguishing between MIMO systems that simultaneously emit different numbers of linearly independent signals from their transmit arrays. Bayesian detectors are derived and their performance is demonstrated in simulations. Generalized likelihood ratio tests are also derived and some drawbacks they manifest in this setting are noted.