Sensors (Apr 2024)
On a Closer Look of a Doppler Tolerant Noise Radar Waveform in Surveillance Applications
Abstract
The prevalence of Low Probability of Interception (LPI) and Low Probability of Exploitation (LPE) radars in contemporary Electronic Warfare (EW) presents an ongoing challenge to defense mechanisms, compelling constant advances in protective strategies. Noise radars are examples of LPI and LPE systems that gained substantial prominence in the past decade despite exhibiting a common drawback of limited Doppler tolerance. The Advanced Pulse Compression Noise (APCN) waveform is a stochastic radar signal proposed to amalgamate the LPI and LPE attributes of a random waveform with the Doppler tolerance feature inherent to a linear frequency modulation. In the present work, we derive closed-form expressions describing the APCN signal’s ambiguity function and spectral containment that allow for a proper analysis of its detection performance and ability to remove range ambiguities as a function of its stochastic parameters. This paper also presents a more detailed address of the LPI/LPE characteristic of APCN signals claimed in previous works. We show that sophisticated Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) systems that employ Time Frequency Analysis (TFA) and image processing methods may intercept APCN and estimate important parameters of APCN waveforms, such as bandwidth, operating frequency, time duration, and pulse repetition interval. We also present a method designed to intercept and exploit the unique characteristics of the APCN waveform. Its performance is evaluated based on the probability of such an ELINT system detecting an APCN radar signal as a function of the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) in the ELINT system. We evaluated the accuracy and precision of the random variables characterizing the proposed estimators as a function of the SNR. Results indicate a probability of detection close to 1 and show good performance, even for scenarios with a SNR slightly less than −10 dB. The contributions in this work offer enhancements to noise radar capabilities while facilitating improvements in ESM systems.
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