Experimental Assessment of Joint Range-Doppler Processing to Address Clutter Modulation from Dynamic Radar Spectrum Sharing

Cognitive sense-and-avoid (SAA) and sense-and-notch (SAN) emission strategies have recently been experimentally demonstrated as effective ways in which to reduce the interference a spectrum-sharing radar causes to other in-band users. In both cases, however, it has been observed that when the spectral content occupied by the radar changes during the coherent processing interval (CPI) in response to dynamic radio frequency interference (RFI), a nonstationarity in the form of clutter modulation is induced that degrades clutter cancellation. Here the efficacy of joint range/Doppler processing is experimentally assessed for this problem through use of the non-identical multiple pulse compression (NIMPC) method. The additional degrees of freedom provided by this type of approach are shown to compensate for this clutter modulation effect to a significant degree, thus implying a benefit to joint range/Doppler processing in general.