System Performance for Coherent and Non-Coherent Processing for Distributed Phased Array Radar

There are significant interests in developing coherent distributed apertures for both commercial and defense applications. Such systems generally would consist of multiple distributed apertures that can provide advanced capabilities in terms of reliability, adaptability and scalability. It should be noted that multiple existing radars can also be networked together to provide improved performance. This paper presents a set of architectures and processing schemes with different complexities in transmit and receive functions that can be leveraged to provide coherent gain on transmit and/or receive or diversity gain when using non-coherent processing. Detection and monopulse angle estimation performances are quantified for various target fluctuation models.