Coherent Integration for Cooperative Bistatic Radar with Joint Time-Domain Waveform Agility
Yiyue Liu, Jiapeng Yin, Yukai Kong, Weidong HuWaveform agility improves anti-reconnaissance and anti-jamming capability in diverse inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) scenarios, but it also breaks the phase variation assumptions used for conventional coherent processing. For cooperative bistatic ISAR radars, the problem is further complicated by the bistatic geometry and phase evolution induced by synchronization. This paper develops a joint coherent integration method for a cooperative bistatic radar with simultaneous pulse width (PW) and pulse repetition interval (PRI) agility. Firstly, we establish and analyze a bistatic geometric model to reveal key integration problems under agile waveforms, and then derive the coherent processing interval (CPI) local polynomial description for bistatic delay, Doppler and acceleration. On this basis, the matched filter response of each agile pulse is analyzed under the fixed-bandwidth assumption with linear frequency modulation (LFM), showing that PW agility produces a compressed peak displacement and an additional deterministic phase term, whereas PRI agility converts slow-time coherent integration into a nonuniformly sampled spectral estimation problem. To solve this problem, a joint fast and slow-time compensation route is derived, together with a bistatic-specific parameter design method that connects coherent integration tolerances with the bistatic angle and the observable projection vector. Finally, we test the performance of the proposed joint integration method in multiple scenarios and verify its effectiveness and robustness, which enhances detection performance and resolution for target localization.