Distributed Active and Passive MIMO Radar

Braham Himed (Air Force Research Laboratory, Sensors Directorate, RF Technology Branch, Dayton, Ohio)
June 12, 2019 — 14:00 — "Amphitéatre Janet (bât. Bréguet)"

Abstract

Passive radar has received considerable interest in the past few years. It is defined as a radar system that can detect and track targets of interest by exploiting readily available, non‐cooperative illuminators of opportunity. This is of great interest to many people for both civilian and military applications, due to a number of advantages. First, passive systems are substantially smaller and less expensive compared to active radar systems because they do not need their own transmitters. Second, the bistatic or multistatic configuration enables it to obtain spatial diversity of the targets’ radar cross section, which leads to potential gains in detection and classification capabilities. Finally, many illuminators of opportunity are available for passive sensing, including analog and digital radio and television. This talk will consider centralized detection in distributed RF sensor networks. We present a comparative analysis of the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) detection in active and passive networks including active multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) radar (AMR), passive MIMO radar (PMR), and passive source localization (PSL). Our results demonstrate that PMR generalizes AMR and PSL in that PMR detection sensitivity may approximate that of AMR or PSL depending on the average direct‐path‐to‐noise ratio (DNR). Thus, PMR may be regarded as the link between AMR and PSL sensor networks that unifies them within a common theoretical framework.

Biography

Dr. Braham Himed received his “Ingénieur d’Etat” degree in electrical engineering from Ecole Nationale Polytechnique of Algiers in 1984, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees both in electrical engineering, from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, in 1987 and 1990, respectively. Dr. Himed currently serves as Division Research Fellow with the Air Force Research Laboratory, Sensors Directorate, RF Technology Branch, in Dayton Ohio, where he is involved with several aspects of airborne and spaceborne phased array radar systems. Dr. Himed led the next generation over the horizon radar (NGOTHR) technology risk reduction initiative (TRRI), which was sponsored by the office of the secretary of defense (OSD). Dr. Himed is the recipient of the 2001 IEEE region I award for his work on bistatic radar systems, algorithm development, and phenomenology. He is also the recipient of the 2012 IEEE Warren White award for excellence in radar engineering. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and serves as Past‐Chair on the IEEE AES Radar Systems Panel. Dr. Himed is a Fellow of AFRL (class of 2013).