Cramer-Rao bounds for the joint delay-Doppler estimation of compressive sampling pulse-Doppler radar

Time-delay and Doppler shift estimation is a basic task for pulse-Doppler radar processing. For low-rate sampling of echo signals, several kinds of compressive sampling (CS) pulse-Doppler (CSPD) radar are developed with different analog-to-information conversion (AIC) systems. However, a unified metric is absent to evaluate their parameter estimation performance. Towards this end, this paper derives the deterministic Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for the joint delay-Doppler estimation of CSPD radar to quantitatively analyze the estimate performance. Theoretical results reveal that the CRBs of both time-delays and Doppler shifts are inversely proportional to the received target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the number of transmitted pulses and the sampling rate of AIC systems. The main difference is that the CRB of Doppler shifts also lies on the coherent processing interval. Numerical experiments validate these theoretical results. They also show that the structure of the AIC systems has weak influence on the CRBs, which implies that the AIC structures can be flexibly selected for the implementation of CSPD radar.