Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of forward-scatter radar (FSR) target detection based on the signals of opportunity made available by standard radio and TV broadcast transmission stations. This passive FSR (P-FSR) operation is obtained by means of a simple and robust correlation process based on self-mixing. This is shown to be very effective in extracting the characteristic FSR modulation produced by airborne targets, from the signals received from frequency modulated, digital audio broadcasting, and digital video broadcasting transmitters of opportunity.

This paper introduces innovative detection schemes for Forward Scatter Radar (FSR) based on the GLRT (Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test) for both cases, where a fixed threshold can be used and where a fully adaptive CFAR scheme is desired. The detection performance of the newly proposed detectors is characterized analytically and compared to the performance of the standard detection scheme. This shows that the new detectors always outperform the standard FSR detector.