Antenna Sidelobes Level Control in Transmit Subaperturing MIMO Radar

This paper addresses the problem to design a transmitsubaperture multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar showing beam clusters with controlled sidelobe level both for the Tx–Rx pattern experienced from target and clutter and for the Rx-only pattern experienced by external interferences. A design strategy is proposed that provides a MIMO scheme with the desired characteristics, together with a low computational cost and a sensibly narrower main beam than the corresponding single-input-multiple-output scheme. An analysis of the accuracy achievable by the proposed scheme is presented by means of Cram´er–Rao lower bound and Monte Carlo simulations. Moreover, an example application is shown using nonideal waveforms to show the practical effectiveness of this TS-MIMO scheme.