On the optimality of Maisel sidelobe blanking structure

We present an optimal sidelobe blanker (SLB) detector for Swerling-1 and Swerling-0 targets and compare the performances of the suggested detector with the classical Maisel SLB structure. The optimal SLB detector depends on the signal to noise ratio (SNR) and jammer to noise ratio (JNR) values and may not be practical for implementation in many applications. The goal of this work is to compare the Maisel structure with the optimal detector which utilizes additional information on target and jammer and assesses the performance gap between two systems. Numerical results show that the performance of Maisel SLB structure is close to the optimal detector under very practical conditions.