MIMO radar detection under phase synchronization errors

We consider the problem of target detection for coherent multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar with widely separated antennas in the presence of phase synchronization mismatch between the transmitter and receiver pairs. First, we introduce a data model using von-Mises distribution to represent the phase error terms. Then we employ expectation-maximization algorithm to estimate the error distribution parameter and target returns as well as the noise variance. We develop a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) target detector using these estimates and demonstrate the effect of phase uncertainties on the detection performance using Monte Carlo simulations.