The problem of estimating the parameters of a moving target in multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) radar is considered and a new approach for estimating
the moving target parameters by making use of the phase information associated
with each transmit-receive path is introduced. It is required for this
technique that different receive antennas have the same time reference, but no
synchronization of initial phases of the receive antennas is needed and,
therefore, the estimation process is non-coherent. We model the target motion
within a certain processing interval as a polynomial of general order. The
first three coefficients of such a polynomial correspond to the initial
location, velocity, and acceleration of the target, respectively. A new maximum
likelihood (ML) technique for estimating the target motion coefficients is
developed. It is shown that the considered ML problem can be interpreted as the
classic "overdetermined" nonlinear least-squares problem. The proposed ML
estimator requires multi-dimensional search over the unknown polynomial
coefficients. The Cram\'er-Rao Bound (CRB) for the proposed parameter
estimation problem is derived. The performance of the proposed estimator is
validated by simulation results and is shown to achieve the CRB.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, Submitted to the IEEE Trans. Signal Processing
in Aug. 201