Deinterleaving of radar pulses in a dense emitter environment

An ESM system consists of a passive radar receiver that receives pulses from the surrounding radars and measures their monopulse parameters, and a deinterleaver that sorts the digital words representing the parameters of theses pulses and groups them in individual radar cells. The parameters of the deinterleaved radar cells are then compared with those of known radars to identify the intercepted radars. The high pulse rate and the low processing speed of both the ESM receiver and the deinterleaver may lead to a large number of missing pulses from the radar cells which consequently results in errors in the deinterleaving process. In this paper, we derive an expression for the factor of successful processing of the ESM system (F_s) as a function of the pulse rate and the parameters of the ESM system. For the given ESM parameters, and the minimum acceptable value of F_s we can determine the highest pulse rate that allows the ESM system to work properly. Inversely, if the pulse rate is known or measured, the performance of the ESM system can be predicted for the given parameters of the ESM system. All derived expressions are supported by extensive computer simulations.