Diversified MIMO SAR waveform analysis and generation

Inspired by recent advances in multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) radar, which has the potential to dramatically improve the performance of radar systems over single antenna systems. This paper proposes a waveform diversity-based MIMO synthetic aperture radar (SAR) concept. The fundamental difference between MIMO SAR and conventional SAR is that the latter seeks to maximize coherent processing gain, while MIMO SAR capitalizes on the diversity of target scattering to improve imaging performance. The system concept and signal models are developed. An example diversified waveform using for MIMO SAR is designed, along with several computer simulations that investigate the correlation performance of the designed waveform. Furthermore, a direct digital synthesizer (DDS)-based approach of diversified waveform generation, in which parallel DDSs are applied, is proposed for MIMO SAR systems.