Digital signal processing for sonar. I. The sonar problem and front-end DSP algorithms

Several orders of magnitude increase in computing power are required to maintain a long range surveillance capability into the 1990s and, within the next decade, typical applications will need throughputs approaching 1000000 MIPs, significantly greater than that currently achieved with fifth generation computers. Increases of this order require simultaneous advances in several areas that impact on sonar, namely in DSP algorithm understanding, distributed system architectures and enabling technologies. The paper outlines some current work in these areas and describes front-end DSP algorithms developed for `processing engines´ realisations for use in multi-channel, high throughput sonar processing systems that can sustain this level of performance