Enhanced monopulse radar tracking using filtering in fractional Fourier domain

Abstract

Monopulse radars are used to track a target that appears in the look direction beam width. The distortion produced when additional targets appear in the look direction beam width can cause severe erroneous outcomes from the monopulse tracking processor. This leads to errors in the target tracking angles that may cause target mistracking. A new monopulse radar structure is presented in this paper which offers a solution to this problem. This structure is based on the use of optimal Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT) filtering. The improved performance of the new monopulse radar structure over the traditional monopulse processor is assessed using standard deviation angle estimation error (STDAE) for a range of simulated environments. The proposed system configurations with the optimum FrFT filters is shown to effectively cancel the additional targets' signals and to minimize the STDAE for monopulse processors even if these targets have the same Doppler frequency.