Joint DOD and DOA angle estimation of coherent targets for bistatic MIMO radar

An improved algorithm for joint direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in bistatic MIMO radar based on fourth order cumulants is presented. Firstly, the data of receiver is reseted and divided to acquire the rotational invariance property of transmitter and receiver, respectively. The fourth order cumulants matrixes in twain are constructed which is based on the basic definition of the cumulant. Then we use propagator method(PM), which requires only linear operation but does not involve any eigendecomposition of the cumulant matrix, to estimate the DODs and DOAs, respectively. Finally, the maximum likelihood method is used to solve the pairing problem. The proposed method is effective in prohibiting the Gaussian colored noise and improves the performance of the angle estimation. It does not need two-dimensional spectrum peak searching and eigenvalue decomposition on the cumulant matrix, thus the computation complexity is reduced. At the same time, it has no claim on the number of receive arrays or receive arrays. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.