Space-Time-Range Adaptive Processing for Airborne Radar Systems

Conventional phased-array space-time adaptive processing (STAP) radar combines angle and Doppler domains to realize clutter suppression. However, it suffers from severe performance degradation in electronic countermeasures scenarios, especially in the presence of mainbeam deceptive jamming. In this paper, a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) STAP radar is studied with a frequency diverse array (FDA) acting as the transmit array, which is referred to as FDA-MIMO STAP radar. FDA can provide controllable degrees of freedom in both range and angle domains. As a result, in FDA-MIMO STAP radar, the target can be discriminated from the clutter and jamming in joint range-angle-Doppler domains. By combining the range, angle and Doppler domains in FDA-MIMO STAP radar, a space-time-range adaptive processing method is proposed based on subspace projection technique. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in suppressing the clutter and jamming.