Leakage Mitigation in Heterodyne FMCW Radar for Small Drone Detection With Stationary Point Concentration Technique

Abstract

To prevent potential hazards posed by fast-evolving drones, it is of importance to develop a radar system for drone detection. Frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radars are widely used for that purpose. Heterodyne architectures are preferred for them to mitigate dc offset errors. Having said that, FMCW radars suffer from permanent leakage from the transmitter into the receiver. The leakage phase noise raises the total noise floor and limits the radar sensitivity. Here, we propose a stationary point concentration (SPC) technique in order to overcome the challenges. The SPC technique concentrates the leakage phase noise on a stationary point to alleviate the impact of the noise. The technique can be realized using digital signal processing without additional hardware. The results show that the proposed technique significantly lowers the noise floor.