Improvements on deinterleaving of radar pulses in dynamically varying signal environments

Abstract

An electronic support system receiver which is a passive receiver picks up an interleaved stream of pulses and extracts their pulse parameters. These parameters are sent to a deinterleaving subsystem which sorts them and forms pulse cells that each are assumed to belong to a specific emitter. In this paper, we develop a method for this task of deinterleaving of radar pulse sequences. For this aim, a novel pulse amplitude tracking algorithm is proposed for dynamically varying signal environments wherein radar parameters can change abruptly. This method particularly works for air-to-air engagements where pulse amplitude distortion due to channel effects can be considered negligible. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm incorporated with a clustering algorithm improves deinterleaving of radar emitters that have agile pulse parameters such as airborne radars. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.