Ambiguity function analysis for UMTS-based passive multistatic radar

There has been a growing interest in passive radar systems in the research community over the last decade because of the several merits they offer, including ease of deployment, low cost, and non-detectability of the receivers. During the same period, the idea of distributed MIMO radar and its advantages under the coherent and non-coherent operating scenarios has been extensively studied. Keeping these benefits it mind, in this paper, we consider a UMTS-based passive multistatic radar with distributed antennas. We compute the ambiguity profiles of this radar system under both the coherent and non-coherent modes. The non-coherent processing mode improves the target detection performance by obtaining spatially diverse looks of the target. On the other hand, coherent processing enhances the resolution of target localization. We use numerical examples to demonstrate our analytical results.