Diversifying the Processing Chain of the Modified Stepped Frequency Radar Waveform Combined with Pulse Compression Techniques

Abstract

A processing chain from the transmitter to the receiver dealing with a stepped frequency waveform combined with phase coding (PC) has been proposed in a recent paper. It consists in splitting the spectrum of a PC pulse into predetermined portions, and then transmitting the corresponding time-domain signals. At the receiver, a modified version of the frequency domain (FD) algorithm is used to process the received echoes. However, this processing chain could be improved. Indeed, alternative modulations could be considered to offer a degree of freedom to the practitioner. In addition, when the number of portions becomes large, the performance of the proposed FD algorithm degrades, the spectrum of the reconstructed waveform being distorted. Therefore, in this paper, the novelty stands in the following items: 1) at the transmitter, the non-linear frequency modulation (NLFM) can be considered as an alternative to PC $2)$ at the receiver, a novel time-domain waveform reconstruction (TWR) is proposed to process the received echoes in the time domain instead of operating in the frequency domain. Our simulations show that, unlike the modified FD algorithm, for any number of portions, the performance obtained using the TWR algorithm is the same at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), whereas at low SNR, the larger the number of portions used, the better the performance.