A hardware-in-loop simulation and evaluation approach for spaceborne distributed SAR

Due to the separation of the radar transmitter and receiver, the channel mismatch, the time and phase synchronization error between synthetic aperture radar (SAR) central electronic equipments (CEE) is the key problems of spaceborne distributed SAR system compared with the traditional single-satellite double pass interferometric SAR (InSAR) system, which has to be considered in the SAR system design, index allocation, integration and testing, verification and validation. A hardware-in-loop simulation and evaluation approach is presented for the influence analysis of CEE payload on the InSAR performance. The hardware-in-loop simulation system includes the master and slave CEE payloads, the time and phase synchronization prototypes, the on-board computer simulator, the SAR target echo signal simulator (TESS) and other auxiliary equipments. For obtaining the influence of the error source on InSAR performance, a hardware-in-loop simulation and evaluation approach based on different hardware configuration is adopted. The experiment results validate the theoretical analysis and computer-based simulation results, and show the feasibility of the time and phase synchronization scheme, which is meaningful for the implementation of the spacebome distributed SAR system.