Exploiting Diversity Gain through MIMO Radar & Sonar Signal Processing

The overall aims of this project were: 1. To propose and study the effectiveness of MIMO transmission waveforms which are designed to meet practical constraints in radar transmit amplifiers;2. To develop and investigate the effectiveness of single dataset detection techniques for MIMO radar detection problems; 3. To investigate the application of MIMO radar detection techniques to sonar systems by both computer simulation and experiment.

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar and sonar systems offer significant performance improvements with respect to conventional ones which transmits a single waveform. The challenge is to design these waveforms both online and offline within the constraints imposed by the particular system. A number of new techniques have been developed in this project that enable more efficient design of the waveforms.
A major obstacle to the adoption of MIMO is the requirement for power efficient constant envelope (CE) waveforms in operational radar systems. The algorithms that have been developed and analysed provide a methodology for the design of MIMO waveforms that are both CE and finite alphabet, the latter being another important practical constraint.