Direction Finding for Bistatic MIMO Radar with Uniform Circular Array

A method of direction of arrival (DOA) and direction of departure (DOD) angle estimation based on polynomial rooting for bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar with uniform circular array (UCA) configuration is proposed in this paper. The steering vector of the UCA is firstly transformed into a steering vector with a Vandermonde structure by using the Jacobi-Anger expansion. Then the null-spectrum function of the MIMO radar can be written as an expression in which the transmit and receive steering vectors are decoupled. Finally, a two-step polynomial rooting is used to estimate DOA and DOD of targets instead of two-dimensional multiple signal classification (MUSIC) search method for bistatic UCA MIMO radar. The angle estimation performance of the proposed method is similar to that of the MUSIC spectral search method, but the computation burden of the proposed polynomial rooting algorithm is much lower than that of the conventional MUSIC method. The simulation results of the proposed algorithm are presented and the performances are investigated and analyzed.