Cramer-Rao bound and signal-to-noise ratio gain in distributed coherent aperture radar

This paper studies the estimation performance of the coherent processing parameter (CPP), including time delay differences and phase synchronization errors among different apertures of the distributed coherent aperture radar (DCAR). Firstly, three architectures of signal processing in the DCAR are introduced. Secondly, the closed-form Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) of the CPP estimation is derived and compared. Then, the closed-form CRB is verified by numerical simulations. Finally, when the next generation radar works in a fully coherent mode, the closed-form signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain of the three architectures is presented.