Signal-Domain Integrated Accurate Measurement and Tracking for Wideband Netted Radar

Due to the high maneuverability and low observability of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), monostatic radar is not robust for UAV probing in practice due to its low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain and low accuracy. In this case, UAV probing using netted radar has become a trend that has the advantages of increasing detection probability and tracking accuracy. However, in the traditional multistatic radar tracking algorithm, the signal processing of each station is performed independently in the data domain, and the measurement and tracking are separated, resulting in low tracking accuracy and poor SNR robustness. In this regard, a signal domain integrated accurate measurement and tracking method for a wideband netted radar is proposed. To address the issue of wideband information utilization, the algorithm constructs the motion dynamic model of netted radar space-time coupling for motion initialization. It introduces the reference signal without information loss and jointly estimates the range and azimuth errors based on a Bayesian posterior model in the signal domain. The framework of integrated accurate measurement and tracking is constructed in the signal domain to realize the information transfer and sharing of measurement and tracking, thereby improving the utilization of target information. Based on the consideration of netted radar, we derive the signal-domain collaborative tracking filter to fuse and filter the multi-source information, realizing high-precision and robust tracking. Simulated and real-measured experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the traditional monostatic/multistatic tracking method regarding tracking accuracy and robustness to noise.