Detection Probability of WCDMA Based Cellular Radar System

Cellular radar is basically a kind of passive radar system. It uses the signal of a base station in a wireless communication system as an 'opportunity of illumination' to detect a target. The meaning of detection in cellular radar is slightly different from other conventional radar systems. It means, we must consider not only the detection criterion of radar system but also that of wireless system to constitute the concept of detection for cellular radar. A radar system regards that the signal is detected if the received signal voltage exceeds the threshold, while in WCDMA system the received signal is said to be detected when PN acquisition succeeds. It is obvious that the cellular radar system fails to obtain sufficient information of targets without guarantee of those two detection criterions. Therefore, we widely need to combine them and consider simultaneously. It is also important to measure how well a system can detect a target, so we define the detection probability. In this paper, we analyze necessity of two detection criterions and provide a novel definition of detection for the cellular radar. Computation of the detection probability in a certain radar environment is also involved.