A Novel Two-Level Nested STAP Strategy for Clutter Suppression in Airborne Radar

Nested arrays have been studied recently in array signal processing field because of their closed-form expressions for the sensor locations and achievable degrees of freedom (DOFs). In this paper, the concept of nesting is further extended to space-time adaptive processing (STAP). Different from the traditional uniform-STAP method that calculates the clutter plus noise covariance matrix (CNCM) and performs the STAP filter direct using the data snapshots collected from the uniform linear array (ULA) and the transmitting pulses with uniform pulse repetition interval (PRI), we present a new optimum two-level nested STAP (O2LN-STAP) strategy which employs an optimum two-level nested array (O2LNA) and an optimum two-level nested PRI (O2LN-PRI) to exploit the enhanced DOFs embedded in the space-time O2LN structure. Similar to the difference coarray perspective, we first construct a virtual space-time snapshot from the direct covariance matrix of the received signals. Then, a new CNCM estimation corresponding to the virtual space-time snapshot can be computed by the spatial-temporal smoothing technique for STAP filter. Furthermore, the comparative simulations and analyses with the traditional uniform-STAP and the recently reported coprime-STAP are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the O2LN-STAP approach.