Coherent FDA Radar: Transmitter and Receiver Design and Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coherent FDA radar design that enhances array gain, resolves secondary range ambiguity, and improves interference and clutter suppression compared to conventional radars.

Contribution

It proposes a novel transmitter and receiver design for coherent FDA radar, enabling spectral overlapping demodulation and improved performance over traditional phased array radars.

Findings

Higher coherent array gain than phased array radar

Effective resolution of secondary range-ambiguous problem

Enhanced anti-interference and anti-clutter capabilities

Abstract

The combination of frequency diverse array (FDA) radar technology with the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar architecture and waveform diversity techniques potentially promises a high integration gain with respect to conventional phased array (PA) radars. In this paper, we propose an approach to the design of the transmitter and the receiver of a coherent FDA (C-FDA) radar, that enables it to perform the demodulation with spectral overlapping, due to the small frequency offset. To this purpose, we derive the generalized space-time-range signal model and we prove that the proposed C-FDA radar has a higher coherent array gain than a PA radar, and at the same time, it effectively resolves the secondary range-ambiguous (SRA) problem of FDA-MIMO radar, allowing for mainlobe interference suppression and range-ambiguous clutter suppression. Numerical analysis results prove the effectiveness of the proposed C-FDA radar in terms on anti-interference and anti-clutter capabilities over conventional radars.