Assessment of Pulse-Doppler Radar and Digital Beamforming Radar

In radar domain, digital beamforming radar is evolving as a promising radar technology as compared to conventional pulse-Doppler radar. The design of PD radar and DBF radar is done by keeping all the design parameters same, and its performance is compared in this work. Needless to say that PD radar uses only analog systems but DBF radar uses digital systems. DBF radar's performance is high, as compared to PD radar because of the use of digital techniques and MIMO antennas. The difference in signal to clutter ratio is 5.23 dB, i.e., SNR of DBF radar is three times greater than PD radar. The only limitation of DBF radar is being the hardware complexity, due to the use of multiple transceivers at each element of an antenna array, resulting in increased cost, size, weight, and power of the overall system.