Performance degradation in cooperative radar sensor systems due to Uncorrelated Phase Noise

A cooperative radar sensor system consists of two or more radar sensors, which are capable of mutually receiving the target responses (cross echoes) of the transmitted signals. The sensors have individual signal sources, that are used both for transmission and reception. In addition to the non-ideal properties of single sensors, the usage of different signal sources for transmission and reception in each path leads to uncorrelated phase noise. In this paper, its influence on target position estimation is investigated. An in-system measurement methodology is proposed, which allows to evaluate the effect isolated and to derive phase-noise performance requirements for component design. In the system setup, the signal sources of the radar sensors are represented by an arbitrary-waveform generator (AWG). By this means, both ideally coherent and perturbed sensor signals can be generated for measurements. Starting from the evaluation of phase-noise-free signals, the degradation in target position estimation performance under the influence of phase noise is evaluated in measurements and compared to simulation results.