CSSF MIMO RADAR: Low-Complexity Compressive Sensing Based MIMO Radar That Uses Step Frequency

A new approach is proposed, namely CSSF MIMO radar, which applies the technique of step frequency (SF) to compressive sensing (CS) based multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar. The proposed approach enables high resolution range, angle and Doppler estimation, while transmitting narrowband pulses. The problem of joint angle-Doppler-range estimation is first formulated to fit the CS framework, i.e., as an L1 optimization problem. Direct solution of this problem entails high complexity as it employs a basis matrix whose construction requires discretization of the angle-Doppler-range space. Since high resolution requires fine space discretization, the complexity of joint range, angle and Doppler estimation can be prohibitively high. For the case of slowly moving targets, a technique is proposed that achieves significant complexity reduction by successively estimating angle-range and Doppler in a decoupled fashion and by employing initial estimates obtained via matched filtering to further reduce the space that needs to be digitized. Numerical results show that the combination of CS and SF results in a MIMO radar system that has superior resolution and requires far less data as compared to a system that uses a matched filter with SF.