Cognitive Processing for Nonlinear Radar

An increasingly cluttered electromagnetic environment (EME) is a growing problem for radar systems. This problem is becoming critical as the available frequency spectrum shrinks due to growing wireless communication device usage and changing regulations. A possible solution to these problems is cognitive radar, where the cognitive radar learns from the environment and intelligently modifies the transmit waveform. In this paper, a cognitive nonlinear radar processing framework is introduced where the main components of this framework consist of spectrum sensing processing, target detection and classification, and decision making. The emphasis of this paper is to introduce a spectrum sensing processing technique that identifies a transmit-receive frequency pair for nonlinear radar. It will be shown that the proposed technique successfully identifies a transmit-receive frequency pair for nonlinear radar from data collected from the EME.