Multistatic Radar Target Detection Based on the Time Reversal in Clutter Environments

The time reversal (TR) technology can effectively utilize the multipath signals to improve the radar detection performance by adaptively matching the propagation channel to achieve the space-time focusing effect. However, in the scenario where the clutter and the multipath signals coexist, the performance of the TR technology on the multipath utilization will be degraded due to the clutter. In this paper, a multistatic radar detection algorithm based on the TR technology and the water filling (WF) algorithm is proposed in the mixed time-varying clutter and the multipath signals environment. To reduce the clutter effect on the multipath signals, the WF algorithm, which can allocate the TR transmitted signal energy according to the clutter power, is introduced into the traditional TR process. Consequently, a TR-WF likelihood ratio test (TR-WF-LRT) detector is proposed to exploit the multipath signals to improve the detection probability. In addition, we also use several other detectors, with or without the WF algorithm or the clutter, for comparison with the proposed detector under the same condition. Both the theoretical analysis and Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that the TR-WF-LRT detector outperforms all the other detectors in the mixed time-varying clutter and the multipath signals environment.