Systemic approach explored in the context of passive target tracking

For obvious reasons of cost, discretion and reliability costs, locating and tracking aerial targets under an electromagnetically completely passive paradigm, relying exclusively on illuminators of opportunity, is very appealing not only for military but also for civilian tasks. Such a passive radar system could exploit signals emitted by existing commercial television or radio stations or even satellite signals, such as the ones belonging to the global positioning system. This study considers target locating and tracking using a network of passive receivers and/or non-cooperative illuminators (a multi-static radar configuration) by making use of the Doppler shift only. A concept, the systemic approach, is used to combine and interpret information available from different sensors. Both the formalisation of the problem and the hardware and software implementation are presented. Implementation makes use of multi-component polynomial-phase signal models and genetic algorithms. For increased performance, implementation on field programmable gate array is envisaged.