CFAR Detectors for MIMO Radars

CFAR (Constant False-Alarm Rate) processors are useful for detecting radar targets in a background for which the parameters in the statistical distribution are not known. A variety of CFAR techniques such as CA (Cell Averaging), Go (Greatest Of), SO (Smallest Of), OS (Ordered Statistics) and ACMLD (Automatic Censored Mean-Level Detector) processors have been proposed for SISO (Single Input–Single Output) radars in a non-homogeneous background. In this paper, conventional CFAR algorithms including CA, SO, OS and ACMLD processors are generalized for MIMO (Multiple Input–Multiple Output) radars. The exact expressions for false-alarm probabilities of the proposed algorithms in a homogeneous background are presented. In addition, the detection performance of the proposed detectors is studied by means of simulation in the presence of interfering targets and also colored Gaussian clutter. Besides, the proposed CFAR processors are compared, and it is shown that the ACML-based algorithm is superior to the other investigated methods.