A Comparison on DOA Parameter Identifiability for MIMO and Phased-Array Radar

We present a comparison on direction-of-arrival (DOA) parameter identifiability between multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) and phased-array radar, which could be considered as additional work to the literature of comparison between these two systems. Conventional and advanced transmission strategies are considered, i.e., transmission without and with beampattern synthesis, respectively. At the receiver, both matched filter (MF) and eigenstructure based MUSIC algorithm, are used to identify the DOA's of the targets of interest. Numerical examples illustrate that when a single target is involved, MIMO and phased-array radar have comparable performance using conventional transmission and MF estimators, but MIMO radar outperforms phased-array radar when transmit beampattern synthesis is used for both systems. Phased-array radar has better estimation performance using MUSIC algorithm for single target. When multiple targets exist, MIMO radar is better than phased-array radar in terms of both angular resolution and sidelobe reduction.