On Sampling and Bandwidth Influences of Distributed Radar Sensors on Automotive SAR Applications

Methods for high-resolution environmental mapping based on chirp sequence radar sensor networks are presented in this paper. The radar sensor network is mounted on a vehicle, allowing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing to be performed in non-stationary operation. For this purpose, raw data from all sensors in the radar sensor network is processed and combined into a common map. Based on measurements, it is shown that the coherent and joint SAR processing of incoherent-networked radar sensors has significant advantages. On the one hand, it is shown that this improves the imaging quality extraordinary. On the other hand, it is shown that the joint processing of all incoherently connected radar sensors in the network allows a significantly higher vehicle speed without violating the Nyquist criterion for spatial sampling and causing artifacts. Finally, a qualitative measurement-based bandwidth evaluation is performed to investigate the influence of range separability on SAR imaging.