Systemic Doppler based aerial target tracking

Abstract

International audience ; For obvious reasons of cost, discretion and reliability costs, locating and tracking aerial targets under an electromagnetically completely passive paradigm, relying exclusively on illuminators of opportunity, is very appealing for military but also civilian tasks. Such a passive radar system could exploit signals emitted by existing commercial television or radio stations or even satellite signals, such as the ones belonging to the GPS. This paper focuses on target locating and tracking using a network of passive receivers and/or non-cooperative illuminators, forming a multi-static radar configuration. The central idea is to make use of the bi-static Doppler shift. To make tracking possible, more than one bistatic Doppler shift has to be measured and the information combined. It is the purpose of the paper to describe this kind of technique and to present its main issues and workarounds, using a gradual approach. Conclusions and perspectives are drawn in the end.