Performance limits of a large passive array

Abstract

The objective of this research is to determine the relative performance levels of several different detectors when the transmitted signal is propagated through the ocean and received by a large, passive array. The transmitted signal is narrowband with a Rayleigh envelope and known carrier frequency while the received signal is calculated by modeling the ocean as a waveguide with a realistic sound velocity profile. The contaminating noise is modeled as temporally independent and spatially dependent non-Gaussian noise. It is shown that the optimal Bayes detector and the locally optimal Bayes detector have similar performance levels if the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is small enough. When the SNR becomes large, the performance levels of the two detectors are substantially different for small probabilities of error.<>