Graceful Degradation An Airborne Surveillance Radar Perspective
Abstract
Active electronically scanned antenna (AESA)-based radars imbibe the desirable feature of ‘graceful degradation’. Such radars use miniaturised transmit-receive (TR) modules and a failure of few modules does not lead to failure of the mission. For example, in AESA-based ground MTI radar, failure of a few modules does not affect the array performance. In such a case, the static ground clutter is centred on zero frequency does not have a motion dependent Doppler spread. However, in airborne AESA radars, the ground clutter has an angle dependent Doppler frequency due to the platform motion and clutter leaking in through antenna side-lobes. Hence, the antenna side lobe levels dictate the side lobe clutter against which target detection is to be performed. The detection performance is governed by the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR). For Airborne surveillance radar the effect of random and systematic failures of TR modules and their effect on SINR is characterised. It is shown that single channel processing does not effectively provide the graceful degradation feature as the SINR loss due to failures is significant. However, the effect of systematic failure on SINR loss is less as compared to random failures. An effective scheme for feeding the array is also proposed.
References
R. Rajesh, P. V. Rao and S. Varughese, “ Integrated guard channel synthesis in AESA based airborne surveillance radar” International Journal on Wireless and Microwave Technologies, Vol 6, Nov 2016.
B. R. Epstein, R. H. Olsson and R. Rotman (Eds), “Phased Array Technologies”, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol 10, No 3, March 2016.
W. Gautier, W. Gruener and M. Kirscht, “Technology challenges and opportunities for next generation AESA based surveillance radar”, Proceedings of the 11th European conference on SAR, Hamburg, June 2016.
T. Kinghorn, I. Scott and E. Totten, “Recent advances in airborne phased array radar systems” IEEE International Symposium on Phased array Systems, USA, Oct 2016.
Agrawal A. K and E. L Holzmann, “Active phased array design for high reliability”, IEEE Trans. Aerospace and Electronic systems Vol 35, No 4, 1999.
S. T. Serkan and C. Baktir, “Reliability modelling and analysis for active phased array antenna design”, IEEE Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, USA, Jan 2017.
H. S .C Wang, “Performance of phased arrays under error conditions”, IEEE Aerospace conference Digest, Feb 1989.
M. Lange, Impact of statistical errors on active phased array performance, IEEE MILCOM, USA, Oct 2007
H. S .C Wang, “Performance of phased array antennas with mechanical errors”, IEEE Trans Aerospace and Electronic systems, Vol 28, No2, April 1992.
M. Kong, C. Wang, Y. Wang and Q. Tu, “Analysis of the influence of array plane error on the performance of hexagonal phased array antenna”, Proceedings of 31st URSI GA, China, Aug 2014.
M I Skolnik “ Non uniform arrays” Antenna Theory (Chapter 6), R E Collin and F J Zuker (Eds), Mc Graw Hill Co, NY 1969.
V Shahmirian and A S Dayoush, “Pattern degradation due to random errors in active phased array antenna”, IEEE Antenna and Propagation society international symposium, CA, USA, 1989.
H. Guodang, S. Mingwei and D. Biao “Effect of sub-system failures on the performance of one dimensional phased array antenna”, IEEE ICMMT, Shenzhen, China, 2012.
X. Li, J. Zhou and Y. Zhang, “ Performance of planar arrays for microwave power transmission with phase shifter error”, Fifth Asia International Symposium on Mechatronics, China, Oct 2015.
Will P M N Keizer “Element failure correction for a large monopulse phased array antenna with active amplitude weighting” IEEE Trans Antenna and propagation, Vol 55, No 8, Aug 2007.
H. Yung, F. Yong, S. Xu, M. Li , S. Cao, J. Gio and Y. Zheng, “ A study of phase quantization effects for reconfigurable reflect array antennas” , IEEE Antennas and Propagation Letters, Vol 16, May 2016.
H.Kamoda, J Tsumochi and F. Suginoshita, “Reduction in quantization lobes due to digital phase shifters for phased array radars”, Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference Proceedings (APMC), Melbourne, VIC, Dec. 2011
M I Skolnik “Introduction to radar systems (3rd ed.)”, Tata Mc Graw Hill, 2001.
J Ward “ Space time adaptive processing for airborne radar”, Technical report 1015, Lincon Laboratory, MIT,1994.
M. McDonald and D. Cerutti-Maori, “Multi-phase centre coherent radar sea clutter modelling and simulation”, IET Radar Sonar and Navigation, Vol 11, Issue 9, Aug 2017.
Arik D Brown “Electronically scanned arrays- Matlab modelling and simulation”, CRC, Taylor and Francis group, LLC 2012.
A. Bentini, M. Ferrari, P. E. Longhi, E. Marzolf, J. Moron and R Zeblanc, “ A 6-18 GHz GaAs multi functional chip for transmit/receive module”, IEEE EuRAD, Italy, Oct 2014.
A Bentini, W. Ciccognani, M. Palamba, D Palombini and E Limiti “High density mixed signal RF front end electronics for TR modules”, IEEE ESTEL, Rome, Oct 2012.
E. Limiti, S. Colangeli, A Bentini and W. Ciccogani, “ Robust GaN MMIC chipset for TR module front end Integration”, International journal of microwave and optical technology, Vol 9, No 1, Jan 2014.
Where otherwise noted, the Articles on this site are licensed under Creative Commons License: CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India