Multiple target three-dimensional coordinate estimation for bistatic MIMO radar with uniform linear receive array

A novel scheme to achieve three-dimensional (3D) target location in bistatic radar systems is evaluated. The proposed scheme develops the additional information of the bistatic radar, that is the transmit angles, to estimate the 3D coordinates of the targets by using multiple-input multiple-output techniques with a uniform circular array on transmit and a uniform linear array on receive. The transmit azimuth, transmit elevation angles and receive cone angle of the targets are first extracted from the receive data and the 3D coordinates are then calculated on the basis of these angles. The geometric dilution of precision which is based on the root Cramer-Rao bound of the angles, is derived to evaluate the performance bound of the proposed scheme. Further, an ESPRIT based algorithm is developed to estimate the 3D coordinates of the targets. The advantages of this scheme are that the hardware of the receive array is reduced and the 3D coordinates of the targets can be estimated in the absence of the range information in bistatic radar. Simulations and analysis show that the proposed scheme has potential to achieve good performance with low-frequency radar.