Joint adaptive pulse compression to enable multistatic radar

Abstract

The fundamental limitation on the concurrent use of the same spectrum by two or more radars is the cross-correlation between the waveforms employed by the respective radars. The waveform transmitted by each individual radar is reflected by an illuminated range profile and is then received by all of the radars (accounting for aspect angle diversity). The received signal at a given radar is therefore the superposition of the return signals from all radars. Hence the use of standard matched filtering can result in masking that arises from the inherent waveform cross-correlations (in addition to the masking that results from autocorrelation range sidelobes). This paper presents a method for adaptively pulse compressing two or more concurrently received radar return signals that occupy the same portion of the frequency spectrum. The proposed method extends the recently developed concept of Reiterative Minimum Mean-Square Error (RMMSE) estimation to estimate adaptively the appropriate pulse compression filter for each particular range cell of each received radar return signal. The resulting algorithm, denoted as Multistatic Adaptive Pulse Compression (MAPC), effectively mitigates the interference caused by autocorrelation range sidelobes and waveform cross-correlations.