On the Relationship Between PRI Staggering and Sparse Arrays

It is well known that pulse repetition interval (PRI) staggering can expand the unambiguous Doppler domain, though doing so likewise increases Doppler sidelobes unless the staggering sequence is carefully constructed. However, there are also diversity benefits from generating random stagger sequences on-the-fly. Within the context of arbitrary stagger sequence generation, we consider the intuitive interrelation to sparse array design in the spatial domain. In so doing, the spatial co-array concept is examined for PRI staggering, along with the effect of redundancy on Doppler sidelobe levels. The physically meaningful boundaries for each domain and associated co-array attributes are observed to provide general guidelines for random PRI staggering.