Effects of Spectral Interference on High-Accuracy Ranging in Coherent Distributed Arrays

The effects of noise-like interference on spectrally-sparse, high-accuracy microwave ranging for coherent distributed antenna arrays are analyzed in this work. Coherent operation between separate nodes in distributed arrays is dependent on the level of accuracy in estimating the internode distances. Internode ranging accuracy is mainly affected by the waveform characteristics along with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), or the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) in the case of added interference. In this work it is shown that the optimal bandwidth of the ranging waveform (a spectrally-sparse, two-tone signal) is dependent on the spectral shape of the interference.