Phase Center Agile Array: An Encrypted Sensing Scheme for Bistatic Radar Systems

Abstract

Bistatic radar has received much attention due to its advantages over monostatic radar, such as capabilities of anti-stealth and anti-jamming. In the bistatic radar system where a transmitter illuminates both the targets and the receivers, any receiver illuminated by the transmitter is able to perform target detection and estimation by using the direct signal from the transmitter as a reference. However, in certain scenarios where dedicated transmitter is used, it is undesired for the transmitted signal to be exploited by illegitimate receivers. Since the receivers use the direct signal as a reference, conventional random signal modulation schemes including amplitude, frequency and phase modulation cannot deal with this problem. In this article, we propose phase center agile array, a bistatic radar scheme that ensures the transmitted signal can only be utilized by the legitimate receivers, i.e., realizes encrypted sensing. The encryption and detection performance of the proposed bistatic radar scheme are analyzed from a statistical perspective. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed encryption scheme.