Mainbeam Deceptive Jammer Suppression With Joint Element-Pulse Phase Coding

This article is focused on resolving the problem of suppressing mainbeam deceptive jammers in the element-pulse coding (EPC) radar. At the modeling stage, the element-pulse phase coding matrix (EPPCM) is employed at the transmit side, introducing extra coding degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) for the discrimination of the true target and mainbeam jammers. By utilizing the extra coding DOFs, nonadaptive and adaptive suppression method for mainbeam jammers are developed. Firstly, in order to suppress the jammers non-adaptively, the EPPCM is designed based on the coding steering vector orthogonalization (CSVO) method, which requires the identical angle of the true and false targets. Then, the adaptive suppression method is proposed for the general cases, where the angle deviation between the true and false targets occurs. To this end, the unitary EPPCM is designed to achieve the coding DOFs at the transmit side. Moreover, we take the towed radar active decoy (TRAD) jammer as an example and the sample selection scheme for the estimation of jammer-plus-noise covariance matrix is proposed. At the analysis stage, experimental and numerical results in terms of output signal-to-jammer-plus-noise ratio (SJNR) demonstrate the effectiveness of the devised methods for suppressing mainbeam deceptive jammers.