MIMO‐STAP With Scaling Modification for Limited Snapshots

ABSTRACT

Multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO)‐space‐time adaptive processing (STAP) can effectively reject clutter in airborne radar with superior spatial resolution. Nonetheless, MIMO‐STAP suffers from severe performance decrease due to the large system degrees‐of‐freedom according to Reed, Mallet and Brennan (RMB) rule. To this end, this paper proposes a MIMO‐STAP with scaling modification (SM), named SM‐MIMO‐STAP. The developed MIMO‐STAP first maps the radar data into another domain with a linear transformation, and the modification is implemented in the transformed domain. Then, a scaling parameter is designed to apply to the MIMO‐STAP weight vector, which is optimised to minimise the radar output power. Ultimately, full‐dimension MIMO‐STAP is effectively implemented with the modified weight vector. The proposed method is in closed form and easy to conduct. Numerical experiments show that the proposed MIMO‐STAP performs better than the conventional SM‐MIMO‐STAP under conditions of limited snapshots and exhibits robust performance against array gain and phase errors.