Angle Estimation for MIMO Radar in the Presence of Gain-Phase Errors with One Instrumental Tx/Rx Sensor: A Theoretical and Numerical Study

Ideal transmitting and receiving (Tx/Rx) array response is always desirable in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. In practice, nevertheless, Tx/Rx arrays may be susceptible to unknown gain-phase errors (GPE) and yield seriously decreased positioning accuracy. This paper focuses on the direction-of-departure (DOD) and direction-of-arrival (DOA) problem in bistatic MIMO radar with unknown gain-phase errors (GPE). A novel parallel factor (PARAFAC) estimator is proposed. The factor matrices containing DOD and DOA are firstly obtained via PARAFAC decomposition. One DOD-DOA pair estimation is then accomplished from the spectrum searching. Thereafter, the remainder DOD and DOA are achieved by the least squares technique with the previous estimated angle pair. The proposed estimator is analyzed in detail. It only requires one instrumental Tx/Rx sensor, and it outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms. Numerical simulations verify the theoretical advantages.