Graceful Performance Degradation and Improved Error Tolerance via Mixed-Mode Distributed Coherent Radar

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Abstract
Distributed Coherent Radar (DCR) is a distributed MIMO radar concept which holds the potential to significantly improve SNR over single aperture and statistical MIMO systems. DCR achieves coherence in one of two modes: Cohere-On-Transmit which yields an N 3 improvement in SNR (N is the number of radars) but requires ideal coherence parameter (CP) information before transmission, and Cohere-On-Receive (COR) which yields an N 2 improvement in SNR but can generally estimate CPs adaptively on reception. System concepts generally make a binary choice between COR and COT operation based on error level. This has lead to multiple studies of coherence parameter error and its impact on performance of each mode. In this work, CP error analysis has been extended to include all three principle coherence parameters (delay, phase, and frequency), as well as simultaneous consideration for the number of radars in the constituent system. This novel analysis reveals significant relationships between number of elements in a system and the resulting error tolerance. A novel DCR operating mode, Mixed Mode DCR (MM-DCR), is introduced which exploits this relationship and achieves N 2+logN(M) SNR gain, where M is the number of elements used for each sub-aperture. MM-DCR is shown to yield better performance than COR and COT under a broad set of error conditions, yielding overall system error tolerance improvements. Moreover, as error varies during system operation, MM-DCR facilitates a graceful performance degradation by varying the size of the sub-apertures.

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