A Random Antenna subset selection jamming method against multistatic radar system

Abstract

Multistatic radar system (MSRS) is considered an effective scheme to suppress mainlobe jamming, since it has higher spatial resolution enabling jamming cancellation from the spatial domain. To develop electronic countermeasures against MSRS, a low complexity random array subset selection (RASS) jamming method is proposed in this paper. In the RASS jammer, elements of the array antenna are activated randomly, leading to stable mainlobe and random sidelobes, which is different from the traditional jammer that applies the complete antenna array enjoying constant mainlobe and sidelobes. We study the autocorrelation matrix of RASS jamming signals received by radars, and derive its rank, revealing that the rank of jamming subspace is increased thus severely degrading the performance of jamming cancellation. Moreover, we calculate the output jamming to signal-and-noise ratio (JSNR) after the subspace-based jamming suppression methods used in MSRS with the proposed jamming method, which demonstrates that the rank increasing property invalidates such suppression methods. Both simulation and experiment results verify our analytical deduction and exhibit the improved countermeasure performance of our proposed RASS jamming method compared to the traditional jammers.