Signal-level cooperative target location based on distributed networked radar

Target location is a crucial property for the civil and military applications and should be performed with high precision immediately. The signal-level cooperative active location of moving targets is studied with the distributed networked radar (DNR) system employing widely dispersed transmit and receive antennas. By setting up simulation and test scenarios, both a centralized processing and a simple distributed processing form the DNR system are developed and studied, and the estimated target track plots of the simulated and experiment data acquired by the first long baseline DNR system in China is contrasted with that of the ADS-B. Furthermore, a detailed verification analysis for the location accuracy obtained by the DNR system is compared with that of a single radar. The results indict that the high accuracy can be obtained by the proposed method owing to the gains from the having widely dispersed antennas of the DNR system and the signal-level centralized detection. The DNR system achieves a spatial diversity gain to overcome fades in target RCS, and simultaneously, it improves the target location accuracy using coherent and non-coherent processing under the condition of low signal-to-noise ratio when comparing to the individual radar composing the network.