Performance Bounds and Angular Resolution Limit for the Moving Colocated MIMO Radar

To identify a target, the moving noncoherent colocated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system takes advantage of multiple antennas in transmission and reception which are close in space. In this paper, we study the estimation performance and the resolution limit for this scheme in which each array geometry is described by the sample-variance of the sensor distribution. So, our analysis encompasses any sensor distributions, including varying intersensors distances or/and lacunar (missing sensors) configuration. As in the space-time MIMO model considered here the radar is moving, the target Doppler frequency cannot be assumed invariant to the target position/angle. The first part of this paper derives and analyzes closed form (nonmatrix) expressions of the deterministic Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRB) for the direction and the velocity of a moving target contaminated by a structured noise (clutter echoes) and a background noise, including the cases of the clutter-free environment and the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. The analysis of the proposed expressions of the CRB allows to better understand the characterization of the target. In particular, we prove the coupling between the direction parameter and the velocity of the target is linear with the radar velocity. In the second part, we focus our study on the analytical (closed form) derivation and the analysis of the angular resolution limit (ARL). Based on the resolution of an equation involving the CRB, the ARL can be interpreted as the minimal separation to resolve two closely spaced targets. Consequently, the ARL is a key quantity to evaluate the performance of a radar system. We show that the ARL is in fact quasi-invariant to the movement of the MIMO radar.