Surface Movement Passive Radar for Small Airports Based on Navigation Satellites as Illuminators of Opportunity

This work puts forward a Surface Movement Passive Radar (SMPR) based on navigation satellites illuminators of opportunity for small airports/private airfields. Multiple receiving nodes sparse over the airport area can detect and localize moving objects exploiting the transmissions of multiple satellites. As the localization accuracy of the detected objects is one of the main key performance indicators for assessing the potential of such a system, a benchmark analysis based on the Cramer Rao lower Bound (CRB) has been carried out. For a more realistic assessment of the performance, a modified version of the CRB accounting for missing observations has been considered. As the abundance of available bistatic channels of the proposed system gives rise to different possible data fusion strategies (resulting in different detection probability and system complexity), bounds for the different combination criteria have been derived, allowing us to analyze the performance achievable with different system's architectures.