Optimizing polyphase sequences for orthogonal netted radar systems

Abstract

Orthogonal netted radar systems (ONRS) can fundamentally improve the radar performance by using a group of specially designed orthogonal polyphase code signals which require a very low aperiodic autocorrelation peak sidelobe level, low aperiodic cross-correlation, and a good resilience to small Doppler shifts. However, the existing numerical solutions degrade severely in the presence of small Doppler shifts. A new set of polyphase sequences is presented with good correlation properties as well as resilience to Doppler shifts. These sequences are built by using numerical optimization based on correlation properties as well as the Doppler effects on matched filter outputs, which maintains the Doppler tolerance. The statistical simulated annealing algorithm and the greedy code search method are used to optimize the sequences. Correlation and Doppler results are compared with the best-known sequences and show to be superior.