Ambiguity function analysis for passive multistatic radar using UMTS signals

Passive radar systems offer several merits including the ease of deployment, low-cost, and non-detectability of the receivers. Traditionally, they have been employed in bistatic configuration. However, in this paper, we consider a UMTS-based passive multistatic radar with distributed antennas. We compute the ambiguity profile of this radar system under both the coherent and non-coherent processing modes in the Cartesian domain. The non-coherent processing mode improves the target detection performance by obtaining spatially diverse looks of the target. On the other hand, coherent processing enhances the resolution of target localization. We use numerical examples to demonstrate our analytical results.