Transmit beamspace-based DOD and DOA estimation method for bistatic MIMO radar

In this paper, we propose a novel angle estimation method in bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar, which combines the transmit beamspace (TB) technique with the unitary ESPRIT (U-ESPRIT) model. The TB matrix is designed to focus the transmitted energy within the desired spatial sector, thus achieving the transmit coherent gain. Due to the special data structure of the TB-based bistatic MIMO radar, a corresponding method is proposed to construct the real-valued model. Unfortunately, the existed interpolation error inevitably degrades the direction-of-departure (DOD) estimation performance. To compensate the DOD estimation error, a look-up table is created, which establishes a one-to-one mapping relationship for DOD. The Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) on angle estimation in TB-based bistatic MIMO radar is also derived for performance analysis. Compared with existing methods, the proposed algorithm has better estimation performance due to the improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain and requires less computational complexity. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the estimation performance of the proposed algorithm. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.