Analysis of intra-pulse frequency-modulated, low probability of interception, radar signals

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the problem of analysis of low probability of interception (LPI) radar signals with intra-pulse frequency modulation (FM) under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions from the perspective of an airborne electronic warfare (EW) digital receiver. EW receivers are designed to intercept and analyse threat radar signals of different classes, received over large dynamic range and operating independently over large geographical spread to advice host aircraft to undertake specified actions. For an EW receiver, primary challenges in interception and analysis of LPI radar signals are low received power, intra-pulse modulations, multi-octave frequency range, wide signal bandwidth, long pulse width, vast and multi-parametric search space, etc. In the present work, a method based on match filterbank localization and Taylor’s series approximation for analysing the entire family of intra-pulse FM radar signals is proposed. The method involves progressive, joint time–frequency (TF) localization of the signal of interest (SOI), under piecewise linearity and continuity assumptions on instantaneous frequency, to effectively capture local TF signatures. Detection is by information-theoretic criterion based hypotheses testing, while estimation and classification are based on polynomial approximation. Fine signal analysis is followed by synthetic reconstruction of the received signal slope. Detection, estimation and classification performances for the prominent FM radar signal classes are quantified based on simulation study statistics. Stagewise implementation of analysis and FM slope reconstruction, in realistic radar threat scenarios, is demonstrated for the potential SOIs. Subject discussion is organized from the perspective of practical EW system design and presented within the realm of signal processing architecture of concurrent EW digital receivers.