Robust STAP for MIMO Radar Based on Direct Data Domain Approach

Abstract

The detection performance of direct data domain (D ³) space-time adaptive processing (STAP) will be extremely degraded when there are mismatches between the actual and the presumed signal steering vectors. In this paper, a robust D ³ STAP method for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar is developed. The proposed method utilizes the worst-case performance optimization (WCPO) to prevent the target self-nulling effect. An upper bound for the norm of the signal steering vector error is given to ensure that the WCPO problem has an admissible solution. Meanwhile, to obtain better detection performance in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environment, the proposed method gives a modified objective function to minimize the array noise while mitigating the interferences. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of our proposed method.