Distributed Radar Network Implementation Using Software Defined Radio

Abstract

Target detection capability of a radar system can be significantly enhanced by deploying a distributed network. Despite their potential, distributed radar networks have not received enough attention in the literature. This is attributed, in part, to the need for highly reliable communications links, that can support information sharing between nodes with a low latency, and achieving different levels of synchronization. In this paper, we consider a distributed network with a central coordinator (CC), where nodes, operating under radar phase in different frequency bands, calculate generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) function values from their received signals. During communications phase, nodes quantize their GLRT values, encode resulting quantized values to bits, and transmit these bits to the CC using amplitude shift keying (ASK) modulation. The CC demodulates noisy received signals from nodes, decodes resulting information, and estimates GLRT function values transmitted by all nodes. The CC fuses the estimated GLRT values and makes a global decision on target detection. We implement this distributed detection method with a software defined radio (SDR) technique that uses Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) kits from National Instruments (NI) and LabView. Under the setup in which the CC and radar nodes are synchronized with a common reference clock, we demonstrate the key steps for implementing the proposed distributed detection with the SDR approach.