Chapter 1 - Introduction

Abstract

Over its history of more than a century, radar has played a fundamental and prominent role in a wide range of civilian and military applications. Multistatic radar is a particular type of radar that incorporates multiple spatially distributed transmitters and receivers. The spatial diversity provided by the separation of transmitters and receivers not only offers several advantages over conventional monostatic radar, but also gives system designers extra degrees of freedom to optimize the radar system design for specific applications. Inspired by the unique peculiarities of multistatic radar in relation to nonlinear signal processing, waveform and geometry, this book presents modern signal processing techniques for multistatic tracking radar systems with the pivotal theme of performance optimization via waveform adaptation, geometry optimization and pseudolinear tracking algorithms. The core of the book is structured into three parts: Part 1 – Adaptive waveform selection, Part 2 – Optimal geometry analysis, and Part 3 – Pseudolinear tracking algorithms. This chapter provides background information and a brief review of radar history, explains the purpose and scope of the book, and outlines the organization of the book.