CLOCK TIMING JITTER ANALYSIS AND COMPENSATION FOR BISTATIC SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR SYSTEMS

Abstract

Bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) operates with distinct transmit and receive antennas that are mounted on separate platforms. Such a spatial separation has several operational advantages, which will increase the capability, reliability and flexibility of future SAR missions. However, this configuration results that there is no cancelation of low frequency oscillator noise as in the monostatic cases. As a consequence, high accurate time synchronization or clock timing jitter compensation must be provided. Literature search reveals little time synchronization work for bistatic SAR has been reported. As such, the use of a new range alignment algorithm to quantify and compensate clock timing jitter is proposed. The impact of clock timing jitter on bistatic SAR is analyzed, and the performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated. Simulation results show that successful clock timing jitter compensation for bistatic SAR is achieved by using the proposed algorithm.