Interception of Multiple Low-Power Linear Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave Signals

Many modern radar systems are overcoming the need for high-power transmitters by utilizing low peak-power, high duty-cycle waveforms, making noncooperative detection methods by traditional electronic surveillance a difficult task. This technological difficulty is driving a need for computationally tractable detection and characterization algorithms. Here, a practical method for detecting and fully characterizing an arbitrary number of low-power linear frequency modulated continuous wave (LFMCW) radar signals is achieved by dividing the time-domain signal into contiguous segments and treating each signal segment as a sum of harmonic components corrupted by noise with an unknown, time-varying power spectral density. This method is developed analytically and evaluated experimentally, revealing that the practicality of the method comes at the expense of a loss in estimation accuracy when compared to the Cramer-Rao lower bound. Experimental results indicate that the parameters of two simultaneous LFMCW signals can be estimated to within 10% of their true values with probability greater than 90% when input signal-to-noise ratios are-10 dB and above with a 25MHz bandwidth receiver.