General clutter modeling for airborne radar

Clutter returns in airborne radar applications spread in Doppler frequency because of platform motion. The clutter characteristics should be analyzed in detail for designing clutter suppression algorithms. In this paper, clutter modeling method for conventional phased array airborne radar, multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) airborne radar, and hybrid MIMO-phased array airborne radar, all with arbitrary antenna array, is presented. Modeling of clutter intrinsic motion, sensor error, subarraying is also considered.