Broadcast consensus based phase synchronization for coherent MIMO radar

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar can achieve improved localization performance by employing a coherent processing approach with proper antenna positioning. Different from the noncoherent counterpart, coherent processing entails the challenge of ensuring phase coherence of the carrier signals from different distributed radar elements. In this paper, we propose a broadcast consensus based algorithm for reaching a common notion of phase in coherent MIMO radar. This algorithm is distributed and iterative in nature. It does not require a priori establishment of the time synchronization, and is thus time asynchronous. We mathematically characterize this algorithm, and further study some statistical properties of the resulting phase synchronization error. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm, as well as to validate our theoretical analysis.