Polarimetric MIMO radar with distributed antennas for target detection

Distributed antenna radar systems provide spatial diversity gain by viewing the target from different angles. Polarimetric radar offers improved performance over conventional radar systems by exploiting polarization diversity. We propose a radar system that offers both spatial and polarimetric diversity gains for detecting stationary point-like targets. The receive antennas of the proposed system use 2D vector sensors, each measuring the horizontal and vertical components of the received electric field separately. We design the Neyman-Pearson detector for this proposed system and analyze its performance. This analysis is used to select the optimal transmit polarizations for this system. Using simulations, we demonstrate the improvement offered by the optimal choice of polarizations. We also show the spatial diversity offered by MIMO radar.