Airborne Multistatic Radar Systems

Research Project, 2023 – 2024

An airborne multistatic radar (AMR) system is a system that includes several transmitters and receivers on several and separated airborne platforms. The direct benefits are that the receiving platforms are silent, the receivers can operate close to an adversary, the transmitters can be further away from adversaries and any jamming is likely directed towards the transmitting platforms. Additional benefits can be secured by transforming two earlier challenges for an AMR system into new types of enablers.

One enabler is to exploit the direct signal between a transmitting platform and a receiving platform. The direct signal allows timing, synchronization, transmitter-receiver coherence and elimination of intricate and complicated planning for all signaling and waveform parameters for all transmitter and receiver pairs in an AMR system. Another enabler is a combination of recent methods and breakthroughs. The methods include estimation of the multistatic geometries using only the characteristics of the ground clutter radar echoes, predict the information gain in all transmitter-receiver pairs, select the most informative pairs for processing and provide guidelines for the receiving platform to move to increase the expected information gain. This allows improved and more robust detection and tracking continuity for small and difficult targets in a background of complicated clutter. The proposed project will help to transform these earlier challenges into enablers for AMR systems.