Multi-input multi-output frequency-modulated continuous wave synthetic aperture radar system using beat-frequency division waveforms

Attention has been paid to lightweight, cost-effective frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in recent years. Though FMCW SAR can operate at high altitude, it is still impracticable for wide swath or high Doppler bandwidth remote sensing because of the dramatic losses of range resolution and processing gain. Moreover, the system sampling rate is too high for real-time processing. All these restrictions caused by the bandwidth loss of the dechirp operation can be relieved by expanding the system sweep cycle. However, the broadening of the sweep cycle decreases the system pulse repetition frequency with azimuth ambiguity, which can be suppressed by exploiting the spatial diversity of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. This paper reports a MIMO-FMCW SAR system using beat-frequency division waveforms. There is a small frequency interval and a large overlap (in frequency) between the orthogonal waveforms. As the frequency interval is much smaller than the signal bandwidth, the echoes that come from different transmitters can be separated by bandpass filtering with little intrapulse interference. Consequently, the applications of FMCW SAR systems can be extended for wider swath or higher Doppler bandwidth remote sensing. Theoretical analysis and simulation results illustrate the feasibility of this system.