Design and processing of a novel chaos-based stepped frequency synthesized wideband radar signal

The linear stepped frequency and linear frequency shift keying (FSK) signal has been widely used in radar systems. However, such linear modulation signals suffer from the range-Doppler coupling that degrades radar multi-target resolution. Moreover, the fixed frequency-hopping or frequency-coded sequence can be easily predicted by the interception receiver in the electronic countermeasures (ECM) environments, which limits radar anti-jamming performance. In addition, the single FSK modulation reduces the radar low probability of intercept (LPI) performance, for it cannot achieve a large time-bandwidth product. To solve such problems, we propose a novel chaos-based stepped frequency (CSF) synthesized wideband signal in this paper. The signal introduces chaotic frequency hopping between the coherent stepped frequency pulses, and adopts a chaotic frequency shift keying (CFSK) and phase shift keying (PSK) composited coded modulation in a subpulse, called CSF-CFSK/PSK. Correspondingly, the processing method for the signal has been proposed. According to our theoretical analyses and the simulations, the proposed signal and processing method achieve better multi-target resolution and LPI performance. Furthermore, flexible modulation is able to increase the robustness against identification of the interception receiver and improve the anti-jamming performance of the radar.