Design and Implementation of a Multi-Beam Passive Sonar System on Multi-Core Processors

This paper presents a scalable hardware and software architecture for a Passive Surveillance Sonar (PSS) system, enabling real-time processing of high-bandwidth data using multicore processors and high-speed telemetry interfaces. Larger arrays, required to detect quieter submarines in noisy environments, increase data loads; a novel scheme is proposed for efficient transfer between the digitizer and processor. The beamformer, the most computationally demanding component, is analyzed in its time-domain delay-and-sum, frequency-domain, and minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) forms, including variants for different array structures. The architecture is evaluated with cylindrical arrays of up to 7,600 sensors generating 4 Gbps of data. The parallel and pipelined design achieves real-time performance and scalability. Experiments demonstrate the formation of 450 panoramic beams, detecting and tracking multiple targets with $$3^\circ$$ bearing accuracy.