Wideband Aperture Coherence Processing for Next Generation Radar (NexGen)

Abstract : This report develops robust signal processing architectures and algorithms specifically designed to achieve multi-aperture coherence on transmit and receive. A key feature of our approach is the use of orthogonal radar waveforms that allow the monostatic and bistatic target returns to be separated at each receiver's matched filter output. By analyzing these returns, we may determine the appropriate transmit times and phases in order to cohere the various radar apertures using both narrowband and wideband waveforms. This process increases the array gain on receive to N2 instead of N for the single transmitter case. Furthermore, when full coherence on transmit is achieved, the array gain is N3. The performance of our coherence algorithms is quantified using Monte Carlo simulations and compared to the Cramer-Rao lower bound. A computational complexity study shows that our aperture coherence algorithms are suitable for a real-time implementation on an SGI Origin 3000 multi-processor computer.