Estimation of intrapulse modulation parameters of LPI radar under noisy conditions

Abstract

Abstract Low probability of intercept (LPI) radars utilize specially designed waveforms for intra-pulse modulation and hence LPI radars cannot be easily intercepted by passive receivers. The waveforms include linear frequency modulation, nonlinear frequency modulation, polyphase, and polytime codes. The advantages of LPI radar are wide bandwidth, frequency variability, low power, and the ability to hide their emissions. On the other hand, the main purpose of intercept receiver is to classify and estimate the parameters of the waveforms even when the signals are contaminated with noise. Precise measurement of the parameters will provide necessary information about a threat to the radar so that the electronic attack or electronic warfare support system could take instantaneous counter action against the enemy. In this work, noisy polyphase and polytime coded waveforms are analyzed using cyclostationary (CS) algorithm. To improve the signal quality, the noisy signal is pre-processed using two types of denoising filters. The denoised signal is analyzed using CS techniques and the coefficients of spectral correlation density are computed. With this method, modulation parameters of nine types of waveforms up to −12 dB signal-to-noise ratio with an accuracy of better than 95% are extracted. When compared with literature values, it is found that the results are superior.