Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems have multiple antennas at both receiver and transmitter. Under the condition of uncorrelated antenna elements and Rayleigh fading, capacity of the system can be increased linearly with the number of antennas. Most of the theoretical works in the past assumed that kind of simplified channel model, but in practice some correlation among the antenna elements may exist that can reduce the channel capacity.Moreover, most papers in the past have focused on frequency-flat fading channels, whereas frequency selective channels have recently received significant attention due to the high demand for high data rate communications.

Motivated by the recent advances in MIMO wireless communications in general, and the research activities at CWCSPR in particular, a group of our scientists started to investigate MIMO-radar. In communications, MIMO systems combat the fading effects of the wireless (multi-path) channel with spatial diversity. Further, the scattering environment can be used by such systems to achieve spatial multiplexing. In radar, the complex targets consisting of several scatters take the place of the multi-path channel. A target's radar cross section (RCS), which determines the amount of returned power, greatly varies with the considered aspect. Those variations impair significantly the detection and estimation performance of conventional radar. MIMO radar systems observe a target simultaneously from different uncorrelated aspects resulting in spatial diversity. This diversity countervails the fluctuations in received power, as figure X illustrates. Furthermore, the targets' RCS at different aspects may be viewed as a unique pattern enabling applications, such as automated target recognition.

Arrays of closely spaced antenna elements have been used in radar for quite some time to enable beamforming or similar techniques. Further, networks of cooperating radar stations have been investigated as so called multistatic radar systems. Our notion of MIMO radar differs from both before mentioned approaches. In contrast to conventional radar arrays, the receiver and transmitter elements are widely separated to achieve spatial diversity. In contrast to multistatic systems, in which the different stations process the signals first separately and fuse their results later, the different received signals in MIMO radar are processed jointly.
Our so far conducted research focused on exploring the effects of spatial diversity in radar on both, detection and parameter estimation performance in white Gaussian noise. We currently develop and investigate new algorithms for moving target indication in a clutter dominated environment. Further, we investigate the bounds and possibilities of target information extraction with a MIMO radar system. Moreover, studies of target tracking algorithms and performance are currently prepared.