Maritime Target Localization from Bistatic Range Measurements in Space-Based Passive Radar

In this article, localization of a maritime target using a passive multistatic radar system, consisting of a single receiver and a number of satellites as its transmitters, is investigated. The set of communication satellites and also the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), including GPS, Glonass, and Galileo, are employed as illuminators of opportunity. In the receiver, the reflected signals from the target along with the direct signal from the satellites are employed to extract a set of bistatic range measurements. Leveraging these measurements and the satellite’s position information, a novel localization method considering zero height of maritime target and appropriate combination of the measurement signals is presented. The proposed method is efficient for localization of maritime targets in cases with arbitrary bistatic range accuracy. The results of numerical simulations confirm the efficiency of the proposed method and its superior performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.