Coherent-on-Receive Synthesis Using Dominant Scatterer in Millimeter-Wave Distributed Coherent Aperture Radar

Abstract

The target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be notably improved by coherent-on-receive synthesis (CoRS) in distributed coherent aperture radar (DCAR). A core challenge of CoRS is to estimate the coherent parameters (CPs), including time, frequency, and phase, in order to cohere the multi-radar within DCAR. Conventional methods usually rely on the target’s own information to estimate the CPs, which is not available in highly dynamic environments. Additionally, the CPs of different targets, especially the phase, are unequal in high-frequency systems. This means that we cannot directly use the CPs of one target to compensate for others. To address these issues, an adaptive CoRS method using the dominant scatterer is proposed for millimeter-wave (MMW) DCAR in this paper. The basic idea is to correct the CPs of the dominant scatterer to compensate for other targets. The novelty lies in the adaptive phase compensation based on the estimated CPs. This phase compensation depends on a series of discrete phase values, which are derived from the limit of synthesis loss within a given configuration. Hence, this method avoids the requirement of prior information or massive searches for the possible locations of other targets. Moreover, the dominant scatterer in this work is an unknown target with strong scattering points in radar detection scenarios, and we focus on analyzing its selection criteria. To validate the proposed method, a prototype system has been fabricated and evaluated through experiments. It is demonstrated that the multi-target can realize CoRS effectively, thus enhancing the target SNR.