Multistatic Data Fusion for GNSS-Based Air-to-Air Passive Radar

Kurzfassung

This work addresses the use of a global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based passive multistatic radar to enable non-cooperative air traffic situational awareness. The low transmit signal power of the GNSS signals is known to largely limit the detection capabilities in the GNSS-based passive bistatic radar case, even when employing a long integration time (LIT). Hence, the possibility of simultaneously employing several GNSS satellites as illuminators of opportunity (IoOs) is explored in this work for improving the signal processing gain and, in turn, the detection performance. A common domain for integrating the bistatic results is defined and the needed transformations are implemented with the help of the chirp Z-transform (CZT). Simulation results employing several satellites confirm the successful domain transformation and the multistatic data fusion.