Abstract: Based on extended aperture of bistatic MIMO radar using asparse array, a joint high accurate method for estimating direction of arrival (DOA) and direction of departure (DOD) is proposed. A bistatic MIMO radar with sparse linear distributed subarrays and dual baselines for both transmission and receiving is used. By designing a nonuniform linear array and using Khatri-Rao product processing, the long baseline of inter-subarray spacing and short baseline of inter-sensor spacing in the transmission/receiving arrays are virtually extended simultaneously. With the redundancy removal and spatial smoothing for the received data, high accuracy estimation of DOA and DOD are accomplished using a dual-size unitary ESPRIT algorithm for angular ambiguities resolution. Compared with conventional algorithms, the proposed method can achieve virtual extension of aperture for the MIMO radar without increasing the number of sensors and computational complexity while achieving effective estimation for transmitting and receiving angle with better performance. Simulation results show effectiveness of the proposed method.

Key words: MIMO radar, sparse array, high accuracy unambiguous estimation, dual-size unitary ESPRIT