Advanced spatial spectrum estimation at subarray level for phase array radar

Abstract

As the electromagnetic environment becomes more and more complicated, the interference suppression becomes a big challenge for the phase array radar. If the interference cannot be suppressed, the performance of the phase array radar decreases dramatically. However, most of the interference suppression method based on the assumption that the direction of the interference is already known. Actually, the direction of the interference also needs to be estimated. In this paper, we propose a advanced spatial spectrum estimation method to estimate the direction of the interference. In our proposed method, in order to reduce the cost and complexity of the calibration for the thousands of antenna elements in the phase array radar, the calibration is at the subarray level which makes the calibration much easier. Each subarray forms a super element. The simulation results shows the proposed method has good performance for the interference direction estimation.