Development and evaluation of a multistatic ultrawideband random noise radar network

The AFIT noise network (NoNET) is an experimental multistatic ultrawideband random noise radar designed to produce highly accurate, highly resolved imagery of a target scene while maintaining a simple design and low probability of intercept posture. This paper covers the radar node design and processing of the bistatic channel information from a cluster of widely distributed noise radar nodes. Design and integration of a distributed and central signal and data processing architecture enables the matlab-driven signal data acquisition, digital processing and multi-sensor image fusion. Experimental evaluation of the monostatic localization performance reveals its range measurement error standard deviation is 4.8 cm with a range resolution of 87.2(±5.9) cm. AFIT's RCS range provides a clutter free joint coverage area for single and multi-target scenarios for assessing the 16-channel multistatic solution. The average multistatic localization error is assessed as 7.7(±3.1) cm and a comparative analysis is performed against the netted monostatic solution.