A Range-Ambiguous Clutter Suppression Method via EPC-MIMO Bistatic Airborne Radar

In this paper, the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) bistatic radar with element-pulse coding (EPC) is studied for suppressing range-ambiguous clutter. The EPC technology employs a series of weighting coefficients to modulate initial phase of each transmit pulse at each transmit element. Thus, it provides extra degrees of freedom in transmit spatial frequency domain. A novel framework of EPC-MIMO bistatic radar is first proposed to acquire transmit-receive-Doppler information of clutter spectrum. Moreover, clutter spectrum property of the established model is analyzed. Due to the coding dependence, a scheme of decoding procedure is given, and an appropriate compensating vector is constructed. After this, three-dimensional adaptive processing is adopted to suppress the separated range-ambiguous clutter. Simulation results are presented to verify the clutter spectrum characteristics in EPC-MIMO bistatic radar and to demonstrate its merits in range-ambiguous clutter suppression.