Performance Analysis for Joint Target Parameter Estimation in UMTS-Based Passive Multistatic Radar with Antenna Arrays Using Modified Cramér-Rao Lower Bounds

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Oct 18;17(10):2379. doi: 10.3390/s17102379.

Abstract

In this study, the modified Cramér-Rao lower bounds (MCRLBs) on the joint estimation of target position and velocity is investigated for a universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS)-based passive multistatic radar system with antenna arrays. First, we analyze the log-likelihood redfunction of the received signal for a complex Gaussian extended target. Then, due to the non-deterministic transmitted data symbols, the analytically closed-form expressions of the MCRLBs on the Cartesian coordinates of target position and velocity are derived for a multistatic radar system with N t UMTS-based transmit station of L t antenna elements and N r receive stations of L r antenna elements. With the aid of numerical simulations, it is shown that increasing the number of receiving elements in each receive station can reduce the estimation errors. In addition, it is demonstrated that the MCRLB is not only a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the number of receiving antenna elements and the properties of the transmitted UMTS signals, but also a function of the relative geometric configuration between the target and the multistatic radar system.The analytical expressions for MCRLB will open up a new dimension for passive multistatic radar system by aiding the optimal placement of receive stations to improve the target parameter estimation performance.

Keywords: antenna arrays; maximum likelihood estimation; modified Cramér-Rao lower bound (MCRLB); modified fisher information matrix (MFIM); multistatic radar; universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) signals.