Ambiguity function study for UMTS Passive Radar

Passive Radar systems, also referred to as Passive Coherent Location systems (PCL),exploit reflections from illuminators of opportunity in order to detect and track objects. Over the last few years there has been an evolution of mobile networks towards the third generation radio wireless communications (3G) as UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System). The UMTS is the European standard for 3G wireless communication and it has been developed by 3gpp (3rd Generation Partnership Project). The downlink signal transmitted from the UMTS base-station (or Node B) presents interesting properties that induced us to verify the usability of the UMTS signal as opportunity signal for passive radar systems. In order to obtain some performance evaluations, we have studied the ambiguity function of UMTS signal through a Simulinkreg model based on the WCDMA library. The simulations have proven that the UMTS signal has good properties in term of range and Doppler resolution. In the last section the bistatic geometry effects on the ambiguity function has been studied.