Waveforms for Simultaneous Air and Ground Surveillance Operations

In presence of targets that respond to transmitter diversity such as polarization, maximization of the output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) in presence of signal dependent interference and noise requires joint optimization of the transmit signal vector and the receiver filter bank. The proposed work involves the design of waveforms to exploit the spatio-temporal diversity associated with an airborne multi sensor array that transmits multiple pulses to detect an airborne or ground based target. Using both horizontal and vertical polarization, it is possible to excite certain modes both for the target and clutter that are unavailable in the case of a single channel case. The cross-interference spectral matrices in fact contain much more information compared to the single channel case. This additional information can be put to use in designing the optimal transmit-receiver vector pair so as to further improve the obtainable SINR. The proposed effort will concentrate on demonstrating improvement in performance to be achieved for AMTI/GMTI applications using spatio-temporal waveform diversity and polarization diversity on an airborne array platform. Phase I efforts will concentrate on quantifying the improvement in performance by combining these methods and will be supported by analytical study and simulation results.