Modeling and Analysis of RFI Impacts on Imaging between Geosynchronous SAR and Low Earth Orbit SAR

Due to the short revisit time and large coverage of Geosynchronous synthetic aperture radars (GEO SARs) and the increasing number of low earth orbit synthetic aperture radar (LEO SAR) constellations, radio frequency interference (RFI) between GEO SARs and LEO SARs may occur, deteriorating the quality of SAR images. Traditional methods only simplify RFI to noise-like interference without considering the signal characteristics. In this paper, to accurately evaluate the impacts of GEO-to-LEO RFI and LEO-to-GEO RFI on imaging quantitatively, an RFI-impact quantitative analysis model is established. Taking account of the chirp signal form of SAR systems, the RFI power and image Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) are theoretically deduced and validated by numerical experiments. Based on the proposed method, the SAR image quality under different system parameters and bistatic configurations is estimated, and the probability of different configurations is also given. The results show that specular bistatic scattering RFI between GEO SARs and LEO SARs has serious effects on imaging, and the probability can approach 2% for certain orbital parameters and will become higher as LEO SAR constellations increase in the future, implying the necessity to suppress the RFI between the GEO SAR and the LEO SAR system.