Information theory and radar waveform design

The use of information theory to design waveforms for the measurement of ex tended radar targets exhibiting resonance phenomena is investigated. The target impulse response is introduced to model target scattering behavior. Two radar waveform design problems with constraints on waveform energy and durat ion are then solved. In the first, a deterministic target impulse response is used to design waveform/receiver-fi lter pairs for the opt ima1 detection of ex tended targets in additive noise. In the second, a random target impulse response is used to design waveforms that maximize the mutual information between a target ensemble and the received signal in additive Gaussian noise. The two solutions are contrasted to show the difference between the characteristics of waveforms for ex tended target detection and information extraction. The optimal target detection solution places as much energy as possible in the largest target scattering mode under the imposed constraints on waveform durat ion and energy. The optimal information extraction solution distributes the energy among the target scattering modes in order to maximize the mutual information between the target ensemble and the received radar waveform.