Joint delay–Doppler estimation for passive bistatic radar with direct‐path interference using MCMC method

Abstract

This study deals with the problem of joint delay–Doppler estimation in a practically motivated scenario of passive bistatic radar, where the surveillance channel is polluted by the direct-path signal residual. A new joint delay–Doppler maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE) based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is proposed. The MCMC method allows one to compute the MLE in a computationally efficient manner. The proposed estimator is based upon generating random variates using a Markov Chain whose stationary distribution approximates the likelihood function and guarantees convergence to the global maximum. In contrast to the recently proposed modified cross-correlation estimator, and the expectation–maximisation-based MLE, it avoids grid search which may lead to a straddle loss or initialisation-dependent iteration which may lead to convergence problems. Simulation results indicate that the proposed estimator achieves a significant performance improvement over existing methods.