Beamforming for fully-overlapped two-dimensional Phased-MIMO radar

We investigate the design of joint transmitter and receiver beamformer within the context of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar employing two-dimensional (2D) arrays of antennas. Specifically, we derive the transmit, waveform diversity and overall transmit-receive beampatterns for the Phased-MIMO radar with fully-overlapped subarrays and compare them with the respective beampatterns for the Phased-array and MIMO radar only schemes. As reported for one-dimensional linear arrays, fully-overlapped 2D subarrays offer substantial improvements in performance as compared with the phased-array and MIMO only radar models. The work considers both the adaptive (convex optimization, CAPON beamformer) and non-adaptive (conventional) beamforming techniques. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the fully-overlapped subaperturing in both cases.