Analysis on Distributed Coherent Radar System with Moving Platforms

Distributed coherent radar system which contains several radar nodes and a fusion central system is firstly introduced by Lincoln laboratory. By joint coherent data processing, these radar nodes can be equivalent to a big and powerful monostatic radar. The echo signal to noise ratio (SNR) of such radar system could be increased by N3 times by fully coherent processing, which could greatly improve the radar detection performance. A lot of research had been done for groundbased coherent distributed radar. In this paper, the distributed coherent radar system is extended to the moving platform. This paper analyzed the problems of target detecting in the nonuniform clutter environment as well as time/space/frequency (phase) synchronization challenges. Besides, the signal models of related problems had been initially established. Finally, the distributed radar prototype with moving platforms had been built and the preliminary experiments had been carried out.