Performance of the excision CFAR detector in the presence of interferers

The presence of interferers in the sample set used by various types of cell-averaging CFAR detectors for estimation of the noise power can cause a drastic degradation in performance. The paper analyses the effect of interferers on the performance of the excision CFAR detector. In this detector, strong samples that exceed an excision threshold are excised from the sample set prior to the cell-averaging operation. The performance of the excision CFAR detector is analysed in both a benign environment and in an environment of an arbitrary number of interferers in the sample set. A Rayleigh fluctuating signal (Swerling Case 1) is used as a model for the received signal. It is found that the detectability loss of the detector in a benign environment is very low and that the degradation in performance caused by interferers is quite small even if the number of interferers is large