Modeling and Impact of Cellular Uplink Aggregate Interference on Radar Performance

This paper presents the results of a study to evaluate the suitability of statistical electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) analysis techniques developed on the Advanced Wireless Services 3 (AWS-3) program [1] to assess the impact of cellular network aggregate interference on DoD radar. To perform this assessment the impact of aggregate emissions from cellular networks is evaluated as a combined function of radar system parameters, cellular geometric pattern, the aggregate interference probability density function (PDF), and the interference power spectral density (PSD). A key contribution of this paper – which is also applicable to radar clutter modeling – is a new method to generate stochastic in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) samples using an augmented zero-memory non-linear (A-ZMNL) transformation that improves upon the limitation of the current ZMNL techniques, and simultaneously matches both the long tail PDF for very low shape factors, and the very sharp drop-off PSD of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based emissions. Finally, we show via Monte-Carlo simulation that the potential impact of the non-Gaussian distribution interference that arises as a function of cellular geometry and density, could be more severe than that predicted by AWS-3 EMC analysis techniques.