Multistatic Radar Data Fusion For Detection With Reduced Transmit Power Consumption

This paper presents a quantitative comparison of the detection performance of two multistatic radar detection methods; the first limited by a communications constraint between its constituent nodes and the second with unlimited communications capacity. The methods are tested for a selection of scenarios with differing target positions, and the transmit power requirements to obtain a similar level of detection performance to that of a monostatic radar are analysed. The scenarios simulated are in two-dimensional space and the multistatic system considered is comprised of a single transmit and three distributed receive nodes. A cell-averaging constant false alarm rate is used for the monostatic and both multistatic detection methodologies proposed. It is found that data fusion at a lower level of abstraction, where communications are non-constrained, can lead to better detection performance in multistatic systems. Additionally, the power resource savings compared to an equivalent performance monostatic system are also presented as part of this work.