Performance Analysis of Noncoherent Pulse Compression Technique

Noncoherent pulse compression (NCPC) is a recently investigated variant of the classical (coherent) coded pulse compression technique [1-5]. The performance of NCPC under various signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions is investigated and compared with coherent pulse compression (CPC). Various performance measurement approaches are used to quantify NCPC performance. All of them indicate very similar performance trends. It was found that, as the SNR of received signal decreases, the advantage of pulse compression in terms of improved SNR, gets diminished. It is therefore argued that NCPC is not well suited for low input SNR conditions, and for applications requiring large pulse compression gain.