Cognitive Software-Defined Radar: Evaluation of Target Detection with RFI Avoidance

Demand for access to the radio frequency (RF) spectrum is higher than ever, which has led to increasing spectral congestion. This circumstance has motivated research and development of systems that can share the RF spectrum efficiently. Systems that share the spectrum non-cooperatively may occasionally attempt to access the same frequency band at the same time. These “collisions” will cause mutual interference, which degrades the performance of both systems. While spectrum sharing techniques and systems are designed to minimize this interference, careful evaluation must be done to assess the performance of the systems sharing a given spectrum. Integration of radar signal processing with a software-defined radar system that employs reactive interference avoidance is done to evaluate the effect that interference avoidance has on radar target detection.