Adaptive monopulse processing of monostatic clutter and coherent interference in the presence of mainbeam jamming

Mainbeam jamming poses a particularly difficult challenge for conventional monopulse radars. The presence of coherent multipath in the form of terrain scattered interference (TSI) can be exploited to suppress mainbeam jamming through space/fast-time processing. The presence of monostatic clutter interference, on the other hand, necessitates space/slow-time processing. Simultaneous adaptive filtering in all dimensions is ideal when both forms of interference are present but computationally prohibitive. We show that the majority of interference rejection can be accomplished with a space/slow-time adaptive processor (i.e., STAP), while TSI can be sufficiently mitigated using a tapped reference beam in fast-time. Simultaneous optimization of the STAP and reference beam weights with appropriate constraints yields the desired sum and difference components of the monopulse processor. Performance results using Mountaintop data demonstrate the superiority of the proposed processor over existing processors.