Multiple Mode SAR Raw Data Simulation and Parallel Acceleration for Gaofen-3 Mission

Gaofen-3 is China's first meter-level multipolarization synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite with 12 imaging modes for the scientific and commercial applications. In order to evaluate the imaging performance of these modes, the multiple mode SAR raw data simulation is highly demanded. In the paper, the multiple mode SAR simulation framework will be briefly introduced to expose how the raw data simulation guarantees the development of Gaofen-3 and its ground processing system. As an engineering simulation, the complex working modes and practical evaluation requirements of Gaofen-3 mission put forward to the higher demand for simulation simplification and data input/output (I/O) efficiency. To meet the requirements, two improvements have been proposed. First, the stripmap mode based multiple mode decomposition method is introduced to make a solid and simplified system simulation structure. Second, the cloud computing and graphics processing unit (GPU) are integrated to simulate the practical huge volume raw data, resulting in improved calculation and data I/O efficiency. The experimental results of sliding spotlight imaging prove the effectiveness of the Gaofen-3 mission simulation framework and the decomposition idea. The results for efficiency assessment show that the GPU cloud method greatly improves the computing power of a 16-core CPU parallel method about 40× speedup and the data throughput with the Hadoop distributed file system. These results prove that the simulation system has the merits of coping with multiple modes and huge volume raw data simulation and can be extended to the future space-borne SAR simulation.