Dual‐radar coherently combining: generalised paradigm and verification example

Coherently combining dual identical radars is a promising technology that can obtain a 23 times signal-to-noise ratio promotion over a single radar. The basic principle of dual-radar coherently combining is to adjust transmitting/receiving time and phase of each radar via the coherent parameters (CPs), with the purpose of achieving coherent-on-transmit and -receive. However, this technology has not been researched systematically, especially in the target moving scenario. In this paper, a signal processing paradigm for dual-radar coherent combination is proposed. Two stages exist in the proposed paradigm: coherence preparation stage and coherence maintenance stage. The former stage is considered as a means of bootstrapping to the latter stage, by offering the necessary coherent combining information (predicted transmit CPs and estimated synchronisation errors). And a great coherent gain is obtained in the latter stage, which allows dual-radar works in a fully coherent transmit and receive mode. In both stages, CPs estimation and prediction are the indispensable key steps, whose corresponding algorithms and constraints are developed, respectively. Given to this proposed paradigm, a dual-radar coherently combining example is implemented under a ballistic target tracking scenario, whose results verify the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm.