A Four Cumulant-Based Direction Finding Method for Bistatic MIMO Radar with Mutual Coupling

Abstract

The mutual coupling effects of the transmitter and receiver are known to degrade the performance of direction finding for a bistatic Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) radar system. A four cumulant-combinatorial matrix-based algorithm is proposed to estimate jointly the Direction Of Departure (DOD)and Direction Of Arrival (DOA) of targets under the coexistences of unknown mutual coupling and Gaussian colored noise. Firstly, the multiple groups of four cumulant matrices both on transmitter and receiver are constructed by using the Kronecker product and the banded symmetric Toeplitz characteristics of the mutual coupling matrices. The block four-cumulant matrix is further constructed by combining the transmitter and receiver four cunmulant matrices. Then the new matrix is combined to extract the transmit and receive shift invariance matrices by using the transmitter and receiver four cumulant matrices. The results illustrate that: The proposed method can estimate the DOD and DOA of the targets efficiently in the presence of the strong mutual coupling effect, and parameters are paired automatically without extra pairing operation. The parameter estimation performance of the proposed method is better than those of the existing methods under the strong mutual coupling effect conditions.