Phase noise mitigation for multistatic FMCW radar sensor networks using carrier transmission

Abstract

For incoherent radar sensor networks, it is desirable to perform both monostatic and bistatic distance measurements. Especially, the bistatic measurements enable to achieve additional information about a target. As for bistatic measurements, different local oscillators are used for system operation, the phase noise (PN) at the receiving (RX) sensor node is uncorrelated to the PN of the transmitter (TX). This effect usually degrades the signal-to-noise ratio for bistatic measurements in comparison to the monostatic measurements. This letter briefly discusses the problem of PN correlation in bistatic distance measurements and proposes a novel system approach that mitigates phase errors between TX and RX oscillators. The proposed concept is mathematically derived and proven with measurements using a radar demonstrator at 77 GHz.