A design-algorithm for MIMO radar antenna setups with minimum redundancy

Coherent multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems with co-located antennas, form monostatic virtual arrays by discrete convolution of a bistatic setup of transmitters and receivers. Thereby, a trade-off between maximum array dimension, element spacing and hardware efforts exists. In terms of estimating the direction of arrival, the covariance matrix of the array element signals plays an important role. Here, minimum redundancy arrays aim at a hardware reduction with signal reconstruction by exploiting the Toeplitz characteristics of the covariance matrix. However, the discrete spatial convolution complicates the finding of an optimal antenna setup with minimum redundancy. Combinatorial effort is the consequence. This paper presents a possible simplified algorithm in order to find MIMO array setups of maximum dimension with minimum redundancy.