High Accuracy Distributed Kalman Filtering for Synchronizing Frequency and Phase in Distributed Phased Arrays

Abstract

Precise frequency and phase synchronization are among the important aspects in a coherent distributed phased array antenna system, and are among the most challenging to achieve for microwave frequencies and above. We propose a high accuracy distributed Kalman filter (HA-DKF) in which the nodes in the array perform consensus averaging on their locally shared measurements, the innovation noise covariances, and the KF-predicted as well as the KF-updated estimates and error covariances, yielding improved electrical state synchronization compared to other works in the literature. We evaluate the algorithm through simulation and show that it converges in fewer iterations and yields better electrical state synchronization than other algorithms.