Reduced complexity angle-doppler-range estimation for MIMO radar that employs compressive sensing

The authors recently proposed a MIMO radar system that is implemented by a small wireless network. By applying compressive sensing (CS) at the receive nodes, the MIMO radar super-resolution can be achieved with far fewer observations than conventional approaches. This previous work considered the estimation of direction of arrival and Doppler. Since the targets are sparse in the angle-velocity space, target information can be extracted by solving an ℒ1 minimization problem. In this paper, the range information is exploited by introducing step frequency to MIMO radar with CS. The proposed approach is able to achieve high range resolution and also improve the ambiguous velocity. However, joint angle-Doppler-range estimation requires discretization of the angle-Doppler-range space which causes a sharp rise in the computational burden of the ℒ1 minimization problem. To maintain an acceptable complexity, a technique is proposed to successively estimate angle, Doppler and range in a decoupled fashion. The proposed approach can significantly reduce the complexity without sacrificing performance.