This paper evaluated the performance of range detection of a MIMO FMCW radar system detecting small vessels in maritime environments, through numerical simulations. The targets were modeled as Swerling1 targets, which resemble target with slow-changing radar cross sections (RCS). A MIMO FMCW system utilizing two transmitting antennas emitting two FMCW signals in different frequency bands, and two receiving antennas for MIMO processing-is proposed. In the MIMO scheme, a waveform design comprises of two subbands with an interval band, is suggested to avoid co-band interference between the two signals emitted from two transmitting antennas. At the receiver, the receiving signals were combined by means of spectrum averaging, before implementation of peak detection to estimate the target range. The performance of the proposed system is observed in terms of probability of range error, simulated over a range of signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). Simulation results indicated that MIMO processing yields approximately 3 dB improvements of probability of range error against SNR, compared to SISO case observed at 20% range error probability. In addition, the effects of interval band deployment on the quality of beat frequency was also discussed.
Small vessels detection is a known issue due to its low radar cross section (RCS). An existing shore-based vessel tracking radar is for long-distance commercial vessels detection. Meanwhile, a vessel-mounted radar system known for its reliability has a limitation due to its single radar coverage. The paper presented a co-located frequency modulated continuous waveform (FMCW) maritime radar for small vessel detection utilising a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configuration. The radar behaviour is numerically simulated for detecting a Swerling 1 target which resembles small maritime’s vessels. The simulated MIMO configuration comprised two transmitting and receiving nodes. The proposal is to utilize a multi-frequency FMCW MIMO configuration in a maritime environment by applying the spectrum averaging (SA) to fuse MIMO received signals for range and velocity estimation. The analysis was summarised and displayed in terms of estimation error performance, probability of error and average error. The simulation outcomes an improvement of 2.2 dB for a static target, and 0.1 dB for a moving target, in resulting the 20% probability of range error with the MIMO setup. A moving vessel's effect was observed to degrade the range error estimation performance between 0.6 to 2.7 dB. Meanwhile, the proposed method was proven to improve the 20% probability of velocity error by 1.75 dB. The impact of multi-frequency MIMO was also observed to produce better average error performance.
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