Radar Collaboration, How to Address the Associated Challenges?

The current geostrategic context has rapidly evolved with the return of high intensity conflict against peer competitor (symmetric) with its panel of threats, meanwhile asymmetric means are concurrently used. This convergence of threats of different nature tends to reduce the available reaction time; as a result, more flexibility is needed to adapt to a wide spectrum of situations, still maintaining detection continuity.Radars and sensors are evolving in order to provide enhanced detection and resilience capabilities. But beyond each individual sensor improvement, collaborative functioning of actors of the detection system is the key to an optimized detection in terms of quality/timeliness and resilience. Collaborative-ready radars are designed today with the objective of bringing this capability to the benefit of the various detection systems that will operate them.Collaborative detection can be organized in different levels, which depend on the level of intimacy between the sensors, on their capability to share objectives and resources. These levels range from sharing air pictures between radars to the collaborative organization of several sensors into a meta-radar. Many aspects are at stakes to allow progression in these different levels, they range from organizational/decision-making aspects to procedural and technical challenges.The paper will dig into the benefits, the challenges and will illustrate the approach by presenting how this detection revolution is approached in a global manner through studies and experimentations implying multiples radars to be further on implemented in the roadmaps of Thales SRA radar products. (Abstract)