PhD Studentship: Multistatic radar sensing

Almost all radar systems currently transmit from the same location. This kind of radar modality has been optimised for decades, however the challenge to detect very small and very fast objects persists, even for the most powerful sensors operating in this way.

A drastic departure from this sensing architecture is “multistatic” radar – enacted by a coherent network of spatially distributed sensors that can be independently transmitting, receiving, or both. By acting in unison, rather than in isolation, they can utilise temporal and spatial diversity whilst simultaneously exploiting shared, intelligent adaptive signal processing whose combined performance and resilience can easily exceed that of the sum of their parts.

However, fundamental and significant questions to provide their practical feasibility and establish their potential remain to be answered, both in terms of enabling technologies for distributed sensing and the techniques that exploit it.

The focus of the PhD project is to improve our understanding on how a multi-static radar system can be utilised to increase radar detection fidelity and radar detection range against small and fast objects. The three enabling technologies, rooted in systems and signal processing techniques, to achieve those are the fundamental questions the PhD will answer:

1) How to establish high radar coherence and sensitivity

2) How to optimise multistatic radar target search strategies

3) How to leverage the spatio-temporal diversity of multistatic radar observations

At the end of the PhD an over-arching modelling environment will be built, where the parameters above can be varied. Crucially, the models we derive will be validated by real-world measurements to ensure our simulation environments are realistic and scalable to more complex radar networks. This will serve as a means of assessing the relative merits and drawbacks of multistatic radar systems over their conventional alternatives, quantify them through relative performance analyses and provide assured knowledge of their validity through practical measurements in real conditions.

The academic supervision team have a track record of more than 20 years each on multistatic radar research and some 500 publications combined in the field of radar. It is aligned to our strategic priority of expanding our critical mass on multistatic radar, which is currently supported by prestigious and large initiatives including the newly established Quantum Hub in Sensing, Imaging and Timing (QuSIT) and a newly awarded Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Research Chair on multistatic radar systems. Finally, it will benefit from world-leading infrastructure uniquely suited to support the programme, i.e. a fully operational network of Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) primary air surveillance radars specially modified to support fundamental multistatic radar research that is available on campus.

Funding notes:

The PhD is available to UK Home students only. The project comes with a generous package that covers UK tuition fees, a stipend that is 20% higher than the UKRI minimum, as well as a dedicated budget for project travel, consumables and training. It is sponsored by the UK Missile Defence Centre and it will include interactions with BAE Systems, including opportunities to spend time on their premises.

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