Multistatic Data Fusion for GNSS-Based Air-to-Air Passive Radar

This work addresses the use of a global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based passive multistatic radar to enable non-cooperative air traffic situational awareness. The low transmit signal power of the GNSS signals is known to largely limit the detection capabilities in the GNSS-based passive bistatic radar case, even when employing a long integration time (LIT). To this end, the possibility of simultaneously employing several GNSS satellites as illuminators of opportunity (IoOs) is explored in this work as a means of improving the signal processing gain and, in turn, the detection performance. A common domain for integrating the bistatic results is defined and the needed transformations are implemented with the help of the chirp-Z transform (CZT). Simulation results employing several satellites confirm the successful domain transformation and the multistatic data fusion.