Efficient computation method for joint DOD–DOA estimation in bistatic MIMO radar

In this article, an efficient computation method for joint direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in bistatic multiple-input and multiple-output radar is presented. Firstly, an extended matrix can be obtained from received signal data, which includes two times sampling number of the data samples. Then, exploiting the unitary transformation, the extended matrix can be turned into a real-valued one, and the propagator method is applied to estimate the real valued signal subspace without any eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) of the covariance matrix. Finally, the subspace method can be used for joint DOD and DOA estimation. Compared with traditional subspace-based methods, the proposed method only involves real-valued processing and avoids EVD of covariance matrix. Thus, the proposed method has lower computational complexity. Furthermore, the proposed method can provide better angle estimation due to the double number of data samples. Simulations results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.