Strategies for sub-optimal air to air STAP in forward looking configuration

This paper deals with the selection of adequate sub-optimal strategies for air to air STAP in a forward looking configuration. The particular scenario is characterized by: (i) need of real-time operability; (ii) strong range dependency of the clutter statistics. To overcome these two aspects, a reduction of the overall number of degrees of freedom (DOFs) has to be performed, thus sub-optimal STAP approaches must be used. In addition, the range dependency of the clutter limits the overall number of available secondary data for clutter covariance matrix estimation. Three strategies for secondary data collection are presented and the corresponding performances are compared for a sample scenario.