Performance Analysis of Amplitude Comparison Monopulse Direction-of-Arrival Estimation

Amplitude-comparison monopulse radar in tracking radar uses the tracking scheme of a monopulse radar to estimate the angle components of a target. The performance of the amplitude comparison monopulse radar under measurement uncertainty is analysed. Measurement noises are modelled as Gaussian random variables. Taylor series expansion is adopted to get analytic expression of the mean square error (MSE). Estimation accuracy, in terms of the MSEs for estimate the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm, is usually obtained from the Monte Carlo simulation, which can be computationally intensive especially for large number of repetitions in the Monte Carlo simulation. To get reliable MSE in the Monte Carlo simulation, the number of repetitions should be very large, which implies that there is a trade-off between reliability of the MSE and computational burden in the Monte Carlo simulation. This paper shows the performance of amplitude comparison monopulse radar by linear approximation of nonlinear equations to estimate the DOA. The performance of amplitude comparison monopulse radar is quantitatively analysed via the MSEs, and the derived expression is validated by comparing the analytic MSEs with the simulation based MSEs. In addition, it is shown in the numerical results that analytically derived MSE is much less computationally intensive in comparison with the Monte Carlo simulation-based MSE, which implies that the proposed scheme in this paper results in drastic reduction in computational complexity for evaluation of the MSE.