Integrated MIMO Passive Radar Target Detection

Integrated passive radar (IPR) can be regarded as next-generation passive radar technology, which aims to integrate communication and radar systems. Unlike conventional passive radar, which does not prioritize communication-centric radar technology, IPR technology places a higher priority on incorporating specific radar constraints to develop waveforms that are better suited for radar applications. This paper deals with the problem of distributed MIMO IPR target detection under uncalibrated surveillance/reference receivers. We focus on a communication-centric radar system consisting of several opportunity transmitters non-overlapping in frequency with the same bandwidth and several spatially separated receivers. Five new detectors are devised according to the likelihood ratio test (LRT), Rao, Wald, Gradient, and Durbin criteria. Although it is shown that these detectors are asymptotically equivalent, they provide different performances in the presence of noisy reference channels. The invariance principle is applied in this paper to show that all uncertainties affecting threshold setting can be unified in the direct-path signal power-to-noise power ratio (DNR) of the reference channels. To ensure effective detection threshold setting regardless of the DNR values in the reference channels, we introduce a novel strategy to adjust the level of the proposed detectors rather than their sizes. Then, we examine false alarm regulations and the detection performance of the fixed-level proposed detectors to demonstrate their effectiveness compared to several existing detectors. Thus, we create a unified framework for uncalibrated MIMO IPR target detection in the presence of noisy reference channels.