A model of non-coherent airborne MIMO space-time adaptive processing radar

Compared to single-input multiple-output (SIMO) radar, airborne multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) space-time adaptive processing (STAP) radar transmits mutually orthogonal or non-coherent waveforms. The waveform diversity increases degrees of freedom (DOFs) of MIMO STAP radar and results in the variation of clutter characteristics. To make things worse, there exists many non-ideal factors in practical project that affect performance of MIMO STAP. Considering all such situations, we derive the covariance matrix of echo signals by utilizing waveform covariance matrix (WCM) and error covariance matrix tapering (CMT) to simplify the MIMO STAP in this paper. Signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) performance simulation results verify that MIMO STAP radar has a better spatial resolution than SIMO radar generally and improving in orthogonality of transmitting waveforms can obtain a better SINR performance.