Robust Multistatic Sea-based Radar

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) proposes to develop, evaluate, and compare three architectures for multistatic radar for Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD). The architectures include a base-line approach and two more advanced refinements: MIMO statistical synthesis and coherent receiver aperture synthesis. The key innovation enabling this study will be the development of a user-friendly computational tool for multi-static radar allowing the effects of radar platform errors (time, position, velocity, and pointing) and system constraints (finite communication bandwidth for resource management and co-registration of radar platforms) to be directly tested and compared. This software tool will leverage existing software and enable both detailed (I/Q level) simulation of multistatic radar returns using in-service radar waveforms and signal processing tools, with a fully simulated physical scene including platform errors. General user-specified RF waveforms are supported along with various target/threat models. The result of the program will be: 1) a robust multistatic architecture, evaluated in terms of the detection ROC curve and fused coherent position/velocity resolution; 2) a functional simulation supporting further refinements in signal processing, fusion algorithm, and radar resource management for BMD.