Information Theoretic Waveform Design and Receive Processing for Pulse Agile Radar

Modern radar systems are increasingly required to operate in complex, dynamic environments where traditional waveform design and signal processing techniques reach fundamental limitations. To address this, waveform diversity has been utilized to increase design degrees of freedom and improve detection performance in challenging scattering scenarios. This dissertation leverages an information-theoretic framework to implement waveform design and receive processing techniques in pulse-agile radars.

First, a modification of Fishers Information known as Marginal Fishers Information is adapted specifically for application to pulse-agile radars, where the ensuing waveform sets are optimally designed to minimize the error covariance of the scene estimate, improving target detection. This methodology is applied to range-Doppler estimation, where some knowledge of the scattering scene is known a priori. By incorporating the a priori knowledge of the scene into the waveform design, the waveforms are able to inherently suppress the self-interference introduced by pulse-agility.

Second, the information theoretic framework is used to create pulse-agile receive processing techniques for range-only and range-Doppler estimation. The range-only implementation is an iterative minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator similar to a Kalman filter, where the innovation-based update suited to pulse-agility, mirrors the Kalman filter’s correction step. The range-Doppler implementation leverages the same principles as the range-Doppler waveform design technique, where some knowledge of the scattering scenario a priori is used to suppress self-interference and improve the range-Doppler estimate in a desired region.

Both the waveform design and advanced receive processing techniques are first developed in the fast-time slow-time parameterization space, and then translated to a frequency-domain implementation to reduce computation complexity and improve tractability. Finally, future work is proposed to round out the content of the dissertation.