Ambiguity Functions for Spatially Coherent and Incoherent Multistatic Radar

The ambiguity function is a key tool for determining the target resolution capability of a radar system. Recently, multistatic radar systems have been proposed where target detection is jointly performed on a vector of captured signals arising from multiple spatially dispersed transmitters and/or receivers. In the work presented here, expressions for the ambiguity functions of such systems are derived based on corresponding statistically optimal multistatic detectors, which themselves depend on the spatial coherence of target fluctuations observed by each receiver. These expressions allow the ambiguity in resolving target position and velocity vectors in two or three dimensions to be determined for any transmitted waveform and multistatic topology. New plots are introduced to illustrate the resulting ambiguity responses by example, and the dependency on spatial, target, and waveform parameters is discussed.