Waveforms for Simultaneous Air and Ground Surveillance Operations

This proposal addresses the joint transmitter-receiver design for simultaneous multitasking efforts such as AMTI/GMTI and SAR by exploiting Spatial, Temporal, Energy, Polarization and Spectral (STEPS) diversities. To exploit spatial diversity, a distributed multi-sensor array is used, whereas multiple pulses are used for temporal diversity. In addition, transmit energy, polarization and spectral information are other additional degrees of freedom available for transmitter-receiver design. For a specific platform geometry and given set of multitasks, the problem of optimally designing the transmit waveforms and their companion receivers is addressed here. To achieve multitasking without increasing the system requirements, new transmitter waveform design methodologies that exploit STEPS diversity will be investigated. In this context, the payoff using multiple transmit waveforms versus a single waveform from collocated as well as distributed sensor scenes will be evaluated. The set of tasks proposed here concentrates on demonstrating the increase in target detection and identification capabilities for multi-sensor systems using an optimum set of transmit waveforms and companion receiver design scheme. A detailed tutorial on “waveform diversity” including state of the art transmit waveform design schemes will be developed as part of this project.