Radar detector performance analysis using EM simulations of targets' RCS

In radar detector performance analysis, it is known there exist targets that do not follow commonly used radar cross-section (RCS) fluctuation models such as the Swerling models. With advances in computational power, the full RCS distributions of many targets can be computed using electromagnetic (EM) simulations. However, these simulated RCS distributions are not fully exploited by radar designers in system performance prediction. In this paper, we demonstrate the calculation of the required SNR of a radar system for a given probability of detection (PD) and probability of false alarm (Pfa) using the EM-simulated RCS probability mass function (pmf) for the case of a coherent detector.