Enhanced Pre-STAP Beamforming for Range Ambiguous Clutter Separation with Vertical FDA Radar

Medium pulse repetition frequency (MPRF) is an important mode in airborne radar system. Since MPRF mode brings both Doppler and range ambiguities, it causes difficulty for the airborne radar to suppress ground or sea clutter. In recent years, it has been pointed out that the frequency diverse array (FDA) radar is capable of separating the range ambiguous clutter, which is helpful for the airborne radar in detecting weak moving targets originally buried in ambiguous clutter. To further improve the ambiguous clutter separation performance, an enhanced pre-STAP beamforming for range ambiguous clutter suppression is proposed for the vertical FDA planar array in this paper. With consideration of range dependence of the vertical spatial frequency, a series of pre-STAP beamformers are designed using a priori knowledge of platform and radar parameters. The notches of the beamformers are aligned with the ambiguous clutter to extract echoes from desired range region while suppressing clutter from ambiguous range regions. The notches can be widened by using covariance matrix tapering technique and the proposed method can improve the performance of range ambiguous clutter separation with limited degrees-of-freedom (DOFs). Simulation examples show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Detection Performance Analysis of the Standard FDA and FDA-MIMO Radar in the Gaussian Background

This paper studies the optimal detection performance of the standard frequency diverse array (FDA) radar and FDA multi-input multioutput (FDA-MIMO) radar in Gaussian clutter and noise. Array signal processing scheme at the receiver is firstly designed to obtain the array steering vector containing range, azimuth, and frequency increment. For the two array configurations, namely, collocated transmit-receive and collocated transmit distributed receive, the likelihood ratio test statistics and the test statistic distributions are derived in the Neyman–Pearson sense. It is then investigated how the number of array elements influences the detection performance of various radar systems at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Several numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate that the performance improvement is hard for MIMO and FDA-MIMO by only increasing the number of transmit elements, while it is achievable for the FDA. The paper finally makes a comparative analysis for detection performances of five radar configurations under different SNRs.

Beampattern analysis of frequency diverse array radar: a review

Electronic beam steering is an essential feature of state-of-the-art radar systems. Conventional phased array (PA) radars with fixed carrier frequencies are well-known for electronically steering their beam with high directivity. However, the resulting beampattern is angle-dependent but range-independent. Recently, a new electronic beam steering concept, referred to as frequency diverse array (FDA) radar, has attracted increasing attention due to its unique range-angle dependent beampattern. More importantly, the FDA radar employs a small frequency increment across the array elements to achieve beam steering as a function of angle, range, and time. In this paper, we review the development of the FDA radar since its inception in 2006. Since the frequency offset attaches great importance in FDAs to determine the beampattern shape, initially much of the research and development were focused on designing the optimal frequency offsets for improved beampattern synthesis. Specifically, we analyze characteristics of the FDA beampattern synthesis using various frequency offsets. In addition to analyzing the FDA beampattern characteristics, this study also focuses on the neglected propagation process of the transmitted signals in the early FDA literature, and discuss the time-variant perspective of FDA beampatterns. Furthermore, FDA can also play a significant role in wireless communications, owing to its potential advantages over the conventional PAs. Therefore, we highlight its potential applications in wireless communication systems. Numerical simulations are implemented to illustrate the FDA beampattern characteristics with various frequency offset functions.

FDA-MIMO Beampattern Synthesis with an Analytical Method

Since the beampattern has the characteristics of range-angle dependence, frequency diverse array multiple-input multiple-output (FDA-MIMO) radar has a good application prospect. There have been many studies to improve the performance of the beampattern by optimizing the frequency offset. However, on the basis of fully understanding the time parameters, the relationship between the array element frequency offset and the beampattern performance still needs to be clarified. Based on a new FDA-MIMO radar framework, this paper presents an analytical solution of the beampattern, which removes the influence of the time parameter. Taking the minimum main lobe as the objective function, an analytical method for solving a better frequency offset is given. Then, a method of using the window function was proposed to reduce the high side lobes of the range dimension. Comparing with the existing FDA radar beampattern design methods, it can achieve a more focusing beampattern. The simulation results verify the correctness of the theory.