Investigation of a New Multifunctional High Performance SAR System Concept Exploiting MIMO Technology

In this paper, we introduce an innovative system concept for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and investigate the performance. Based on multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configuration, a versatile SAR operation can be feasible, for instance interferometric and full polarimetric SAR operation over a wide area simultaneously. For this purpose the space-time coding (STC) and digital beamforming (DBF) are key elements of the proposed MIMO SAR concept. A waveform diversity gain is obtained from the STC scheme, applied on transmit and DBF on receive provides array gain and improved noise performance for each multiple SAR images. In this paper, using a simple transmit diversity technique, well known as Alamouti scheme, the complete processing topology is introduced. The performance is investigated from a system point of view.