Performance comparison of airborne phased-array and mimo radar with subarrays

A generalized signal model for airborne phased-array (PA) and multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar with colocated antennas is proposed. This model is based on partitioning the transmit array into a certain number of uniform subarrays that are allowed to overlap. Different subarrays transmit identical waveforms for PA radar while orthogonal or non-coherent ones for MIMO which maintains coherent processing gain in each of them. Passive element-level phase shifting is utilized within each subarray in order to steer the scanning beams. On the basis of the unified model, we focus on the performances of space-time adaptive processing (STAP) and nonadaptive processing technique by formulating and evaluating the signal-tointerference- noise ratio (SINR) for PA and MIMO radar. Beamforming-based modified joint domain localized (BBM-JDL) method is employed as the STAP technique. It is verified that under the same coverage condition, performances of PA and uniform non-overlapped MIMO radar are nearly same, while fully overlapped MIMO radar possesses the potential of achieving higher performance.