Compact Bistatic Iterative Passive Radar Based on Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting Signals

Abstract

Passive radar has become very popular in recent years because it is usually undetectable, and countermeasures used to prevent its functioning are complex and, in general, easily identified. Terrestrial digital video broadcasting (DVB-T) is commonly used as an opportunistic illumination signal because of its large range and widespread deployment, both of which make it applicable to almost all scenarios. This paper presents the design of a compact and robust receiver for passive radar that uses a low number of antenna while achieving high accuracy. In order to do this, we use an iterative algorithm to refine the initial estimations based on time-domain channel information to converge to the true estimations. This is especially effective when the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) at the receiver is moderate and/or there are several reflections in the environment that may introduce some error into schemes that perform the angle of arrival or time of arrival for the estimation. The algorithm proposed herein is able to accurately estimate the position of a target with a low SNR.

Keywords

• passive radar
• DVB-T
• iterative algorithm