Minimum statistical dispersion beamforming for MIMO radar

Abstract

A minimum dispersion based beamformer is developed for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. In statistics, dispersion is defined as the expectation of the pth power of the modulus of a random variable, which can be considered as a generalization of variance with p = 2. By noticing that the linear combination of the transmitted waveforms at the target location exhibits non-Gaussian property, we adopt the minimum dispersion criterion at the receiver instead of the widely used minimum variance criterion, which implicitly exploits non-Gaussianity and hence improves the performance of the beamformer. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the proposed method compared with the conventional beamforming techniques.