Representative demonstrator of a matched illumination radar

An adaptive (or cognitive) radar operates by sensing the environment and accordingly adopts an optimal transmit-receive structure. To this end, in the literature, matched illumination (MI) principles have been investigated to realize this concept, algorithms have been developed for the different components in such radars, and the entire framework validated through numerical simulations. However, these algorithms need to be verified for real-time operation in a hardware environment before being deployed in an actual radar. This paper describes the implementation of a representative demonstrator of a cognitive radar using two National instruments vector signal transceivers. The main objective is to validate the performance in terms of SINR by comparing to the numerical simulations and identify the real-time constraints for realizing a hardware prototype of a cognitive radar.