Range Ambiguous Clutter Suppression for Airborne FDA-STAP Radar

Abstract

Airborne radar arrays oriented toward any direction other than sidelooking cause the range dependence of clutter. It is difficult to handle this range dependence problem in the presence of range ambiguity. Frequency diverse array (FDA) employs a small frequency increment across the array elements, which induces the spatial frequency variant with respect to slant range. Thus, it provides extra degrees-of-freedom in range domain. In this paper, a novel framework of space-time adaptive processing (STAP) radar is established with FDA as the transmit array. In the FDA-STAP radar, the range ambiguous clutter can be discriminated in spatial frequency domain. This is due to the fact that the spatial frequencies of the clutters from different slant ranges are distinguishable even though the range ambiguous clutter is within the same range bin. Simultaneously, the FDA-STAP radar induces secondary range dependence of clutter. To alleviate the secondary range dependence of clutter, a secondary range dependence compensation (SRDC) method is proposed for two cases: 1) the target is assumed in the unambiguous range region and 2) the target is assumed in the ambiguous range region. After the range ambiguous clutter is separated in the spatial frequency domain by using the proposed SRDC method, the traditional clutter compensation approach is applied to further align the spectrum distribution of clutter. Our simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in clutter suppression under range ambiguous clutter scenarios.