A signal level simulator for netted radar waveforms evaluation

When evaluating the performances of radar waveforms, it is crucial to understand how the signal is affected by multiple interactions with the environment and the system hardware. Analysis of complex radar systems, such as multistatic and netted designs (see Fig. 1) is often intractable without the application of a dedicated radar simulation system. Recent research into radar simulation has focused primarily on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems and is not entirely applicable to traditional radar systems concerned with the location and tracking of remote targets. A complete simulator has been designed for the accurate simulation of raw returns in complex, multistatic and netted radars and is applicable to pulsed and continuous wave (CW) systems, and both active and passive radar systems. The flexible simulator for multistatic radars (FERS) can be used to simulate radar systems with arbitrary waveforms and arbitrary numbers of receivers, transmitters and scatterers. In this paper, algorithms for the simulation of raw radar return signals are presented, based on interpolation and modification of the transmitted signal and modelling of the radar hardware and environment. The algorithms are expected to be especially valuable for the simulation of emerging radar technologies, such as Passive Coherent Location (PCL), netted radar and phased array radar. Preliminary results, presented in this paper, suggest that these algorithms can simulate physical systems with excellent accuracy.