Clutter-based gain and phase calibration for monostatic MIMO radar with partly calibrated array

Abstract

Abstract The gain and phase calibration of monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars with partly calibrated arrays is addressed and a clutter-based orthogonal projection (OP) method is introduced. When the transmitter and receiver of a monostatic MIMO radar are both uniform linear arrays with the same array spacing, a non-zero OP matrix for the joint transmit-receive array steering vectors can be found. The clutter output power projected on the OP matrix is zero if array is perfectly calibrated. Hence, the transmitter gain and phase can be calibrated by minimizing clutter projection output power for a well-calibrated receiver subarray. Subsequently, the unknown receiver gain and phase errors can be estimated with a similar projection method. Numerical simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.