A scalable real-time processing chain for radar exploiting illuminators of opportunity

This thesis details the design of a processing chain and system software for a commensal radar system, that is, a radar that makes use of illuminators of opportunity to provide the transmitted waveform. The stages of data acquisition from receiver back-end, direct path interference and clutter suppression, range/Doppler processing and target detection are described and targeted to general purpose commercial off-the-shelf computing hardware. A detailed low level design of such a processing chain for commensal radar which includes both processing stages and processing stage interactions has, to date, not been presented in the Literature. Furthermore, a novel deployment configuration for a networked multi-site FM broadcast band commensal radar system is presented in which the reference and surveillance channels are record at separate locations. The processing chain design reviews existing methods for each stage of the processing chain and proposes new approaches where appropriate. The algorithm implementation and greater processing chain integration is then presented for each respective stage to maximise processing and memory transport efficiency and in turn, the total throughput of the processing chain. Optimal signal processing techniques are targeted as far as possible to maximise signal to noise ratio and signal to interference ratios. Graphics processing units are exploited to accelerate highly parallel linear algebra operations which facilitates real-time throughput. The processing chain also provides automatic scaling to multiple graphics processing units when available to hinge maximum performance out of the available system hardware. Interfacing to subsequent stages of radar processing such as tracking are also provided along with testing of an implementation