Modular Performance Analysis of a Cascaded TDM-MIMO FMCW Radar for Short-Range Counter-UAV Sensing

Small unmanned aerial vehicles are difficult short-range radar targets because their millimeter-wave radar cross-sections often fall between −10 and −25 dBsm. This paper presents a modular analytical and simulation-based benchmark of a cascaded 77 GHz TDM-MIMO FMCW radar with 12 transmitters and 16 receivers, yielding a 192-element virtual ULA over a 40 m instrumented range. The framework is organized around the main counter-UAV sensing functions: range–Doppler processing first evaluates target observability and provides range–Doppler gates; Doppler-dependent TDM phase compensation is then required before virtual-array snapshots are formed for DoA estimation; and a separate long-dwell single-transmitter branch evaluates micro-Doppler separability using handcrafted features and a nearest-centroid Mahalanobis classifier. Four benchmarks are considered: detection under Swerling fluctuation models, residual TDM phase error caused by Doppler quantization, DoA estimation under an idealized far-field snapshot model, and micro-Doppler separability among UAV and bird classes. Under Swerling I, targets with a mean RCS of −10 dBsm or larger maintain detection probability above 0.9 throughout the 40 m window, whereas the −20 and −25 dBsm classes fall below that level at about 28 m and 21 m. In the far-field DoA benchmark, TLS-ESPRIT gives the lowest conditional RMSE and remains about 13–14 dB above the subarray CRLB at moderate SNR; however, these angular results are reference ceilings because the short-range operating region violates the full-aperture far-field condition and because residual TDM phase error can be severe without accurate compensation. In the micro-Doppler benchmark, birds exceed 95% per-class accuracy at 20 dB total SNR, but overall four-class accuracy saturates near 72–75% and UAV-only three-class accuracy near 63%, with most confusion between the micro-quadrotor and fixed-wing classes. This study therefore identifies architecture-specific performance margins and limitations before measured-data field validation, rather than claiming complete deployment-level performance.