A reduced-rank STAP algorithm for simultaneous clutter plus jamming suppression in airborne MIMO radar

Abstract

A reduced-rank (RR) space-time adaptive processing (STAP) method for simultaneous clutter plus jamming suppression in airborne multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar is proposed. Firstly, the system parameters of MIMO radar STAP are utilized to construct the clutter subspace offline. Next, an auxiliary channel allocated with the matched filter orthogonal to all the transmit waveforms is utilized to achieve the accurate estimation of the jamming plus noise covariance matrix. Finally, through exploiting the off-line constructed clutter subspace and the block-diagonal property of jamming plus noise covariance matrix, the zero-forcing method is applied to obtain the MIMO-STAP weight vector. The proposed method can provide an approximate full-dimension optimum performance for clutter plus jamming suppression, while the computational complexity can be significantly decreased. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RR MIMO-STAP method in the presence of clutter and jammers.