An improved MIMO-SAR simulator strategy with ray tracing

Abstract

High resolution and wide-swath imaging can be obtained by Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with the state of the art technologies. The time division multiple access (TDMA) MIMO SAR mimics the motion of the antenna of SAR systems by switching the array channels to transmit the radar signals at different time slots. In this paper, we develop a simulation tool with ray tracing techniques to retrieve high resolution and accurate SAR images for development of MIMO SAR imaging methods. Without loss of generality, in the proposed simulator, we apply a TDMA MIMO SAR system with 13 transmitting antennas and 8 receiving antennas, where all transmitting antennas share a single transmitter and the receiving antennas share a single receiver. By comparing with the normal simulation MIMO SAR strategies, the simulation image using ray tracing results validate that the proposed method provides more accurate and higher resolution SAR images.