Cooperative Multimonostatic SAR: A New SAR Configuration for Improved Resolution

This letter presents a new synthetic aperture radar (SAR) configuration that has been named cooperative multimonostatic SAR (CMM SAR). CMM SAR consists of a battery of monostatic SARs whose flight paths and frequency bands are coordinated in such a way that the final system produces high-resolution images. The point spread function (PSF) of CMM SAR has been used to quantify the gain in resolution as compared to a monostatic SAR system operating under the same k-space area. Three different configurations of CMM SAR have been proposed. Evaluations of these CMM SARs are done, and the results show substantial improvement in performance compared to the conventional monostatic SAR. One of these three CMM SARs is especially the most successful in terms of both gain in performance and simplicity in implementation.