Time reversal MIMO radar: Improved CRB and Angular Resolution Limit

The paper derives closed form (nonmatrix) expression for the deterministic Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for the direction-of-arrival associated with a target embedded in a noisy, multipath channel using the time reversal (TR) MIMO system. By incorporating the TR built-in adaptive waveform processing feature to reshape the MIMO probing signals, we prove that the CRBs for the direction of arrival can be improved in ways not foreseen with the conventional MIMO radars. A second contribution of the paper is the analytical derivation of the Angular Resolution Limit (ARL) defined as the minimal separation between two targets to be separately resolved by the MIMO radar. At high signal-to-noise ratio, we show that the TR ARL inherits the properties of the TR CRB and is superior to its conventional counterpart by a factor proportional to the order of the channel multipath.