Airborne Flexible-Array Radar Clutter Characteristics and STAP Performance Analysis

Airborne flexible-array (FA) radar has been attracting increased attention due to its promising application potential. As space-time adaptive processing (STAP) plays an important role in moving target indicator applications, this article studies an airborne FA radar framework and its clutter characteristics and STAP performance. Taking deformable structure of the wing FA radar as an example, the corresponding spatial-temporal signal model is formulated with deformation parameters. Next, the spatial-temporal clutter properties of FA radar are analyzed mathematically by exploiting the clutter covariance matrix and Doppler characteristics. Furthermore, one clutter suppression method is proposed by jointly utilizing the compensation algorithm, temporal-dimension reduction filtering, and spatial adaptive processing. Finally, STAP performance analysis for the airborne FA radar is provided. Numerical results verify all the theoretical analyses.