Simulation and Detection Performance Evaluation of a UAV-mounted Passive Radar

This paper presents the concept of an UAV-mounted passive radar. Since the radar has no active transmitter and uses signals transmitted by illuminators of opportunity (IOO), it is a low cost, lightweight, low-power consuming solution perfectly fitting for mobile applications, especially for mounting on a UAV. Moreover, it does not require supplemental frequency allocation and creates no additional interference to existing wireless networks. Longterm evolution (LTE) is a good candidate for illuminators of opportunity (IOO) due to the fact that orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals are used. Moreover, LTE base stations are widely deployed. In this paper, the detection performance of a drone-mounted passive radar is presented, with various settings in terms of targets, wireless propagation, realistic antenna patterns and signal processing.