A Reconfigurable MIMO-SAR Transmission Scheme Based on Inter-Pulse and Intra-Pulse Joint Phase Modulation

The echo separation issue associated with different transmit antennas is the most technical challenge in realizing the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system. In this paper, a reconfigurable MIMO-SAR transmission scheme based on inter-pulse and intra-pulse joint phase modulation is proposed. The proposed scheme has many advantages. First, lots of monostatic waveforms can be directly employed in a MIMO-SAR system, which offers flexibility in waveform selection. Second, according to different MIMO-SAR applications, it is reconfigurable and can flexibly adjust the system Degree of Freedoms (DoFs) to accomplish echo separation, achieving the best system performance, which is the key for the multimodal operation of MIMO-SARs. Finally, due to the limited system resources in the real MIMO-SAR system, it is hard to separate echo in a single domain, and the proposed scheme jointly capitalizes DoFs of Doppler, time, and space domains to ensure the successful echo separation. In addition, detailed simulation experiments are carried out to verify the practicability and effectiveness of the newly proposed transceiver schemes.