Joint DOD and DOA estimation for bistatic MIMO radar with combined array errors

The existing direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithms suffer from sensitivity to the mutual coupling, gain-phase errors and sensors position errors of the transmit and receive array for bistatic MIMO radar. By applying two well-calibrated instrumental sensors in both transmit and receive arrays, a novel angle estimation algorithm, with the combined influences of the above three array errors for bistatic MIMO radar, is proposed without the knowledge of the combined array errors. We show that the combined array errors can be translated to angularly dependent gain and phase errors. Then a reduced dimensional method is used to estimate the angles. The proposed algorithm can “decouple” the DOD, DOA and combined array errors parameters, so it does not refer high-dimensional nonlinear search but only one-dimensional search. Our simulation results corroborate our analysis.