Gridless DOD and DOA estimation in bistatic MIMO radar using 2D-ANM and its low complexity algorithms

Abstract

Compared with the traditional subspace methods, the application of compressed sensing (CS) to the direction-of-departure (DOD) and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar can achieve robustness to coherent targets and high localization accuracy with a limited number of snapshots. However, the performance of grid-based CS reconstruction methods degrades since there is an unavoidable basis mismatch between the actual DOD/DOA and the assumed basis. As a gridless CS method, the atomic norm minimization (ANM) has attracted much attention. Specifically, the use of multiple snapshots in ANM has improved the parameter estimation accuracy in contrast with a single snapshot. In this paper, we address the problem of gridless DOD and DOA estimation in bistatic MIMO radar, and develop a multiple-snapshot 2D-ANM algorithm and its two low complexity versions. We start with a rigorous derivation on how to convert the multiple-snapshot 2D-ANM into a semi-definite programming problem, and then explore its dual problem. To overcome the heavy computational burden of the 2D-ANM when the numbers of snapshots and array elements increase, we further propose a 2D-ANM algorithm with snapshot reduction (2D-ANM-SR), as well as an improved 2D-ANM-SR algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (2D-ANM-SR-ADMM). Numerical examples show that with similar accuracy in comparison to 2D-ANM, much lower computational complexity can be achieved via 2D-ANM-SR and 2D-ANM-SR-ADMM.