Optimization of Confirmation Time of Bistatic Tracks in Passive Radar

The paper presents a method for optimizing the mean confirmation time of a bistatic track (in bistatic range, bistatic velocity coordinates) in passive radar by adjusting the processing parameters. The track confirmation method is a standard cascaded logic, or "m out of n" logic. To provide high reliability of the confirmed tracks, the expected rate of confirmed false tracks is calculated, and it is used as a constraint during the optimization process. The optimization is based on a joint analysis of several parts of the processing chain of the passive radar, including the correlator, detector, and tracker. The parameters tuned to obtain minimum confirmation time are integration time, probability of false alarm (set by detection threshold), and parameters of the initialization logic m and n. Because the results depend on the signal-to-noise ratio, a parallel processing structure is proposed with different parameters in each branch to accommodate varying echo signal strengths. As a result, one can obtain improvement in track confirmation time with assumed number of confirmed false tracks per second. The developed procedures are tested on a simulated signal as well as on real-life data recorded with the experimental passive system PaRaDe.