Rapid Ray Tracing Analysis of Scattered Field from an Aircraft Model in Super Wide Area

Abstract

The system based on the Passive Bistatic Radar (PBR) expected as the surveillance system of aircraft, uses scattered waves from an aircraft which are much smaller than the directed wave. In such system, it is important how to locate receivers in order to construct a high performance of surveillance system. Consequently, field estimation is required to optimally allocate receivers. However, since current numerical techniques such as Ray Tracing Method (RTM) consume much computation time in order to search rays from source to receiver, they are applied to only small area within a few square kilometers. Its analytical areas are enough to investigations for cellular phone or digital broadcasting, but it is too small to obtain the field distribution in the wide area for the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new numerical algorithm for analyzing scattered fields from an aircraft in super wide area in order to apply to the development of the ATM system. The essence of the proposed algorithm based on the RTM is to simplify the ray searching from source to receiver, resulting in reducing of the computation time. We discuss the principle of our method and the theory of electromagnetic field, and we show scattered powers and delay profiles from a simple aircraft model.