Unfolded coprime bistatic MIMO radar for joint DOD and DOA estimation: from viewpoint on aperture augment for sum coarray

Generally, the coprime linear array (CLA) consisting of two interleaved uniform linear subarrays can enlarge the array aperture to attain the better angle estimation performance compared with the uniform linear array (ULA). In this paper, we ulteriorly study the virtual sum coarray of the unfolded coprime (UC) bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar whose transmitter and receiver array are both unfolded CLA from the viewpoint on the geometry and array aperture. The UC MIMO radar can be exploited to obtain the better joint direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation performance due to the larger array aperture. Furthermore, we propose an all sum coarray multiple signals classification (ASCA-MUSIC) algorithm for the UC MIMO radar. ASCA-MUSIC can fully exploit all the degrees of freedom (DOFs) in the sum coarray and can obtain the better estimation performance. We also prove that ASCA-MUSIC can avoid the phase ambiguity problem due to the coprime property. In addition, we devise a reduced complexity scheme for ASCA-MUSIC to reduce the high computational complexity and utilize Cramer–Rao Bound (CRB) as a benchmark for the lower bound on the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of unbiased angle estimation. Finally, the numerical simulations verify the effectiveness and superiority of the UC MIMO radar, ASCA-MUSIC and the reduced complexity scheme.