Improved Detection Performance of Passive Radars Exploiting Known Communication Signal Form

TL;DR

This paper enhances passive MIMO radar target detection by deriving a likelihood ratio test that exploits known communication signal formats, significantly improving detection performance especially with more samples per symbol.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized likelihood ratio test that leverages known digital communication signal formats in passive MIMO radar, improving detection accuracy over traditional methods.

Findings

Performance improves with more samples per symbol.

Detection performance approaches active radar levels with sufficient samples.

Exploiting known signal formats yields significant detection gains.

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of target detection in passive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar networks. A generalized likelihood ratio test is derived, assuming prior knowledge of the signal format used in the non-cooperative transmit stations. We consider scenarios in which the unknown transmitted signal uses either a linear digital modulation scheme or the Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation scheme. These digital modulation schemes are used in popular standards including Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) and Long Term Evaluation (LTE). The performance of the generalized likelihood ratio test in the known signal format case is often significantly more favorable when compared to the case that does not exploit this information. Further, the performance improves with increasing number of samples per symbol and, for a sufficiently large number of samples per symbol, the performance closely approximates that of an active radar with a known transmitted signal.