Development and Implementation of Algorithms for Electronic Warfare Signal Processing

Electronic warfare (EW) deals with advances in military technology to master and control the electro-magnetic spectrum to achieve offensive and defensive operational objectives against the adversary radars. EW system generally includes transmit-system like Radar, receiver-system like Radar Warning Receivers (RWRs) and receiver transmit-system like Radar Warning Jammers (RWJ). EW system may be ground-based, ship-borne or air-borne. In the present context, case of air-borne EW is considered from the perspective of a host airborne RWR/RWJ acting against multitude radar in time, frequency, and spatial domains. In a typical airborne-EW scenario, host aircraft encounters various threat radar with wide range of functionalities like search, surveillance, track, gun-fire control etc. Each radar is designed with specific signal and modulation characteristics coupled with allied radiation profiles. Host aircraft deploys ESM/RWR techniques/system for detection, estimation and classification and ECM/RWJ techniques/system to evade/deceive/destroy the threat radar. The objective here is to receive and identify the threat signal, manipulate the signal characteristics and enter the reception path of the threat radar with the jamming signal. The constraints and challenges for the EW system in this process are multi-octave frequency range of operation, wide instantaneous bandwidths, broad spatial coverage, presence of multiple threat radar with different signatures, real-time processing difficulties, large data handling, lack of apriori information on signal and noise statistics, high-level of noise and interference etc.