Bistatic radar

Radar imaging

Physics

Engineering

Astronomy

Radar engineering details

Doppler effect

GNSS applications

Passive radar

Geography

Antenna (radio)

Electronic engineering

Satellite system

Satellite navigation

Computer science

Radar

Global Positioning System

Remote sensing

Telecommunications

Real-time computing

IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems

This paper addresses the exploitation of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) as transmitters of opportunity in passive bistatic radar systems for maritime surveillance. The main limitation of this technology is the restricted power budget provided by navigation satellites, which makes it necessary to define innovative moving target detection techniques specifically tailored for the system under consideration. To this aim, this paper puts forward long integration time techniques able to collect the signal energy over long time intervals (tens of seconds), allowing the retrieval of suitable levels of signal-to-disturbance ratios for detection purposes. A local plane based technique is first considered, providing target detection in a plane that represents the section of maritime area covered by the radar antenna. As a suboptimum solution in terms of achievable integration gain, but more efficient from a computational point of view, a second technique is considered working in the conventional bistatic range and Doppler plane (basic plane based). Results against synthetic and experimental datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

Maritime Moving Target Long Time Integration for GNSS-Based Passive Bistatic Radar