The Design and Implementation of a Simulator for Multistatic Radar Systems

Abstract

This thesis presents the design and implementation of a signal level simulator

supporting a wide variety of radar systems, and focusing on multistatic and

netted radars. The simulator places few limits on the simulated system,

and supports systems with arbitrary numbers of receivers, transmitters,

and scatterers. Similarly, the simulator places no restrictions on the radar

waveform to be simulated, and supports pulsed, continuous wave (CW) and

carrier-free radar systems.

A exible model is used to describe the radar system to be simulated, with

the parameters of the radar hardware, the properties of scatterers and the

layout of objects in the simulated environment speci_ed in XML format. The

development of the simulation model focused on balancing the requirements

of exibility and usability, ensuring that the model can be e_ciently used to

represent any type of radar system.

Oscillator phase noise is a limiting factor on the performance of some

types of radar systems. The development of a model for the deterministic

and static components of phase noise is presented. Based on this model,

an algorithm for the e_cient generation of synthetic phase noise sequences

was developed, based on a multirate signal processing approach. This thesis

presents this algorithm, and results of simulations of the e_ects of phase noise

on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and pulse-Doppler radar systems.

The FERS simulator, an implementation of the simulation model presented

in this thesis, was developed in the C++ and Python programming languages.

This simulator is able to perform real-time simulation of some common radar

con_gurations on commodity PC hardware, taking advantage of multicore and

multiprocessor machines. FERS has been released as open source software

under the GNU general public licence (GPL).

Validation of the simulator output was performed by comparison of simulation

results with both theory and measurements. The simulator output was

found to be accurate for a wide variety of radar systems, including netted

pulse-Doppler, moving target indication (MTI) and synthetic aperture (SAR)

radar systems.