A new transmit beamforming algorithm for subarray MIMO radar

Benefiting from its extra degrees of freedom brought by waveform diversity, MIMO radar allows to optimize the transmit beam-pattern much more freely. In this paper, a new transmit beamforming algorithm is proposed for subarray MIMO radar. Firstly, the correlation matrix of the transmitted waveforms is optimized to focus the transmit energy within the interested sectors. Then, the eigendecomposition method is applied to calculate the subarray beamforming weights according to optimized correlation matrix. Meanwhile, a principle for determining the number of the subarrays is proposed, which will reduce the computational complexity for subarray MIMO radar. In addition, simulation results show that the proposed method obtains a better DOA estimation performance compared to some of the existing transmit beamforming methods.