Bistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar Synchronization Processing

Abstract

Bistatic synthetic aperture radar (BiSAR), operates with separate transmitter and receiver that are mounted on different platforms (Cherniakov & Nezlin, 2007), will play a great role in future radar applications (Krieger & Moreira, 2006). BiSAR configuration can bring many benefits in comparison with monostatic systems, such as the exploitation of additional information contained in the bistatic reflectivity of targets (Eigel et al., 2000; Burkholder et al., 2003), improved flexibility (Loffeld et al., 2004), reduced vulnerability (Wang & Cai, 2007), forward looking SAR imaging (Ceraldi et al., 2005). These advantages could be worthwhile, e.g., for topographic features, surficial deposits, and drainage, to show the relationships that occur between forest, vegetation, and soils. Even for objects that show a low radar cross section (RCS) in monostatic SAR images, one can find distinct bistatic angle to increase their RCS to make these objects visible in BiSAR images. Furthermore, a BiSAR configuration allows a passive receiver, operating at a close range, to receive the data reflected from potentially hostile areas. This passive receiver may be teamed with a transmitter at a safe place, or make use of opportunistic illuminators such as television and radio transmitters or even unmanned vehicles [Wang, 2007a]. However, BiSAR is subject to the problems and special requirements that are neither not encountered or encountered in less serious form for monostatic SAR (Willis, 1991). The biggest technological challenge lies in synchronization of the two independent radars: time synchronization, the receiver must precisely know when the transmitter fires (in the order of nanoseconds); spatial synchronization, the receiving and transmitting antennas must simultaneously illuminate the same spot on the ground; phase synchronization, the receiver and transmitter must be coherent over extremely long periods of time. The most difficult synchronization problem is the phase synchronization. To obtain focused BiSAR image, phase information of the transmitted pulse has to be preserved. In a monostatic SAR, the colocated transmitter and receiver use the same stable local oscillator (STALO), the phase can only decorrelate over very short periods of time (about 3 1 10− × sec.). In contrast, for a BiSAR system, the transmitter and receiver fly on different platforms and use independent master oscillators, which results that there is no phase noise cancellation. This superimposed phase noise corrupts the received signal over the whole synthetic aperture time. Moreover, any