FDA Radar With Doppler-Spreading Consideration: Mainlobe Clutter Suppression for Blind-Doppler Target Detection

Abstract This paper proposes a mainlobe clutter suppression approach for frequency diverse array (FDA) radar blind-Doppler target detection, by exploiting the Doppler-spreading (DS) effect. As an emerging array processing technique, FDA differs from conventional phased-array in that it employs a frequency increment across the array elements. When a large frequency increment is used, the FDA radar echo signal from a moving target will be spectrally spread in Doppler domain. Inspired by this phenomenon, we establish a joint range-angle-Doppler processing model for FDA radar with DS consideration. Using resolution capability analysis, we show that that this DS effect provides potentials in resolving Doppler ambiguity and meanwhile suppressing mainlobe clutters. As an application example, the proposed FDA radar model with DS consideration is used for blind-Doppler target detection in mainlobe clutters. Analytical expressions for the detection probability and signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio (SCNR) are derived for the proposed FDA-based target detection. Numerical results show that the proposed approach outperforms the counterparts for the FDA radar without DS consideration and conventional radars.