2016 Progress In Electromagnetic Research Symposium (PIERS), Shanghai, China, 8–11 August

A Passive Radar System for Detecting UAV Based on the OFDM

Communication Signal
Xiaoqi Yang, Kai Huo, Weidong Jiang, Jingjing Zhao, and Zhaokun Qiu
School of Electronic Science and Engineering
National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan, China

Abstract— In this paper, to detect and manage Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), a pas-
sive radar array system is discussed to receive and process the Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing (OFDM) echoes of UAV, which are originally transmitted by the nearby base s-
tations. A uniform circular array is employed to receive the echoes whose model is introduced.
To handle the echoes, a signal processing subsystem including the Pulse Compressing (PC), the
Digital Beam Forming (DBF), and an improved Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) detector is
established. As a result of exploiting CFAR and an additional judgement part based on target
velocities, UAVs can be obtained and distinguished from other flying objects.

1. INTRODUCTION
With the gradual opening of low-altitude control, the key areas have been involved in great safety
hazard brought by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), e.g., as reported on January 23, 2015, a
UAV invaded the White House for espionage activities. This raises up the urgent requirement to
effectively detect and manage such targets. However, it is technically difficult to detect UAVs due
to issues like multipath effect. One promising solution is to make use of the Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiplexing (OFDM) communication signals as they can provide higher spectrum effi-
ciency and better anti-multipath performance than Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) [1–3].
The OFDM signals transmitted from base stations can cover thousand-meter scale regions, thus
they may be reflected by UAVs or some other flying objects so that it is possible to detect the
invasive targets through signal processing and target recognition by exploiting their characteristics.
OFDM is widely recognized as the core of the 4th generation wireless communication [1, 3].
OFDM radar invented by Jankiraman [1] in 1998 which was named “PANDORA” also gains atten-
tion as a new method for distance and Doppler estimation for its big time-bandwidth product [2].
In later years, scholars from University of Miami [1] summarized key findings about a wideband
system for both radar and communication using OFDM. Similar researches were carried out [2–5]
since 2009: the French Aerospace Lab [2, 3] developed a OFDM system named HYCAM applied
for RCS measurement for time-varying targets. Moreover, OFDM signal is proved to be well-fit
for passive radar for its anti-multipath performance: N. Levanon and E. Mozeson [6–9] came up
with an idea that OFDM passive radar could be utilized for navigation, spaceflight and intelligence
collecting especially. Later, Z. Li et al. [6] investigated the direction-finding algorithm applied by
OFDM passive radar. Among the existing literatures, direction-finding based on phased array pas-
sive radar is the most widely researched content [10–12]. Adapting to the threatening trend that
UAVs are evolving rapidly, there is no time to delay promoting the improvement in OFDM passive
radar detecting technique.
This paper provides an overview of a detection system including the circular antennas array,
signal processing modules and a judgement part. In Part 2, a new Constant False Alarm Rate
algorithm named A-CFAR, Pulse Compressing (PC) and Digital Beam Forming (DBF) technique
are proposed so that the UAVs in certain scope can be detected effectively through judgement
by target radial velocities. In Part 3, we get a precise PC result which contains information of
distance. In addition, after choosing the number of antennas and a proper array radius, an ideal
DBF performance is provided. The system with simple structure has advantage of low cost-benefit
ratio on the whole.

2. A PASSIVE RADAR SYSTEM BASED ON THE OFDM COMMUNICATION SIGNAL

2.1. Method of Solution and Module Settings
It can be seen from Figure 1 that the system is composed of a uniform circular array, a signal
processing subsystem and a judgement module. In this work, a single communication station which
is transmitting OFDM signal is considered. The OFDM echoes scatterered by some unknown flying

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Figure 1: Flow-diagram of system signal processing.

targets are received by the circular array and sent to signal processing modules. In order to keep
the unique symmetry of circular array, the number of antennas should be set as multiple of four.
In the signal processing subsystem, after receiving the OFDM echoes, the DBF part is applied
to “collect” gains of all antennas in a desired angle by weighting them and highlights the direction
of arrival. A high-frequency low-noise amplifier is employed to amplify the weak echoes which
are submerged in the multipath noise. The output of the amplifier is demodulated by using the
local oscillator and the output baseband signal is pulse-compressed to get a 1-dimensional (1-D)
range profile which contains radial distance information of targets. After that, a CFAR module
is applied to the square of the 1-D range profile to pick up the suspected targets from multipath
echoes reflected by other objects.
As the echoes scattered from UAV targets are usually weak which may be submerged in the
strong echoed from other objects such as multipath echoes scattered from buildings. Simply using a
CFAR detector may not get a good detection performance. Therefore, the CFAR output is further
processed by a judgment module. The judgment module can be described as follows: we get all
the suspected flying targets from CFAR output whose Doppler frequency shifts can be fetched in
OFDM echoes to calculate their radial velocities. Invasive UAVs will be caught effectively according
to their unique velocity range which differ from some other flyers. In spite of false alarm brought
by CFAR, we expect ideal judgment result based on velocity aiming at cut off all false dismissal
probability, which enhances the detection performance of the whole system.
2.2. The OFDM Echoes Model
The OFDM communication signal can be expressed as:

∑
N −1 K−1
∑ ( )
t − ktb 1
s (t) = wn an,k exp (j2πfn t) rect − (1)
tb 2
n=0 k=0

where N is the number of carrier and K is the length of encoding. wn is defined as weighting of the
n-th carrier. tb is the time of a code element and αn,k is regarded as element k of the n-th carrier.
fn = f0 + n∆f is the center frequency of the n-th carrier.
Assume there are I targets and the time-delay of a moving target i is set as τi . The Doppler
D = f v 1 (v is the velocity of target i, c is electromagnetic
frequency shift in the n-th carrier is fi,n n ic i
wave speed) and σi is the backscattering coefficient. So the echoes of flying targets are deduced as:

∑
I
( ( ) )
x(t) = σi s(t − τi ) exp j2π f0 + fi,n
D
(t − τi ) + n(t)
i=1
∑I
( D )
= σi s(t − τi ) exp (j2π(f0 t − φ0 )) exp(j2π fi,n t − fi,n
D
τ ) + n(t) (2)
i=1

where φ0 = f0 τ is the change of carrier phase brought by time-delay. n(t) is the white gaussian
noise. The Doppler phase shift can be ignored as it is very small. Thus a brief expression after

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down-conversion in frequency is generated as:

∑
I
( )
x(t) = σi s(t − τi ) exp j2πfi,n
D
t − jφ0 + n(t) (3)
i=1

2.3. DBF Based on Circular Array

A directive main beam aiming at the expected direction can be achieved after DBF. The array
directional function is defined as:  
F (α) = wH a(α) (4)
where a(α) is the array beam direction vector, wH is the Hermite transform of weighting vector w.
In order to form an ideal beam, the main lobe should point to the echo direction αi (the direction
of target i), whose solution is w = a(αi ).
We assume the azimuth angle is θ and pitch angle is φ. Every azimuth angle of corresponding
antenna is θk = 2Mπ
(k − 1), k ∈ (1, 4M ). If we expect that the main beam lobe points to (θ0 , φ0 ),
the array radiation pattern function can be given by in the formula:

∑
4M
F (θ, φ, θ0 , φ0 ) = Ak ejκr0 [cos(θ0 −θk ) sin φ0 −cos(θ−θk ) sin φ] (5)
k=1

where κ = 2π/λ (λ is the wave length) denotes the wave number. If the pitch angle is kept as 90◦
constantly, the radiation pattern will turn into a one-variable function expressed as:

∑
4M
F (θ, θ0 ) = Ak ejκr0 [cos(θ0 −θk )−cos(θ−θk )] (6)
k=1

If azimuth is 0◦ , it is described as:

∑
4M
F (φ, φ0 ) = Ak ejκr0 (sin φ0 −sin φ) (7)
K=1

As above, the number of antennas and the array radius may influence the function. We suppose
all antenna gains are the same, they are set as Ak = 1. As expected, OFDM echoes could be
converted to information about azimuth and pitch after analyzing the functions synthetically.
2.4. A-CFAR Algorithm
Considering Rayleigh clutter caused by multipath effect, averaging CFARs are applied to detect
weak target echoes, which includes cells averaging CFRA (CA-CFAR), greatest of cells CAFR (GO-
CFAR) and smallest of cells CAFR (SO-CFAR). Combining advantages of them, a new adaptive
averaging CFAR named A-CFAR is proposed.
The process diagram of A-CFAR is illustrated in Figure 2. Sampling sequence from square-law
detector is regarded as the input of A-CFAR. We calculate the average values of the left and the

input output
Protect Protect Threshold
XL XL ... XL
units V units
XR XR ... XR
comparator
1 2 N 1 2 N

Average unit Average unit

subtracter subtracter T

Mod MIN Mod

Figure 2: Flow-diagram of A-CFAR.

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right half sequences separately, and then send the two results into substracters to compare with
V . If two difference values of substracters are generated, the smaller one will be determined as
threshold after multiplied by T which is defined as the coefficient. Weak target echoes identified
from strong clutter echoes are saved in the results synthesis module as CFAR output.
Obviously, the calculated threshold will decrease when compared with other CFARs to avert
false dismissal because of the substracters, resulting in which the false alarm rate accelerates but
can be solved by the judgement part.
2.5. Judgement by Radial Velocity
Many flying objects such as birds, fire balloons, and kites can influence the UAVs detection result
and thus lead to high alarm rate. However, the unique velocity range of UAVs is the ground of
decision which is within [70, 120] meters per second and the eligible ones are determined as UAVs.
By analyzing the OFDM echoes, the Doppler frequency shift could be calculated according to
D c/f . Table 1 shows velocity ranges of suspected flyings.
vi = fi,n n

Table 1: Different velocity ranges of moving targets.

Target Velocity range (m/s)

Low speed bird [8, 10]
High speed bird [200, 400]
UAV [70, 120]
Fire ballon [5, 10]
Parachute [6, 10]
Kite [0, 4]

Figure 3: 1-d range profile of targets.

6

4
power

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300

sample sequence
Figure 4: Result of A-CFAR aiming at weak targets detecting.

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3. SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS

According to the China Mobile Company parameters in the 4th generation communication, sim-
ulation experiments of OFDM signal are conducted. There are three targets in sensor area and
their radial distances are 2750 m, 2800 m and 2830 m respectively. The result of PC in Figure 3
illustrates the 1-D range profile is in conformity with what we preset about radial distance on
account of OFDM high frequency.
The detective result of targets through A-CFAR is shown in Figure 4. The CFAR arithmetic
is not only capable of anti-clutter-edge of GO-CFAR but also gives consideration to multi-targets
condition which is the advantage of SO-CFAR. There are about 20 false alarm points in the certain

0 0

-5
-10
-10

-15 -20

-20 -30

-25
-40
-30

-35 -50

-40 -60
-45
-70
-50
-80
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 0 1 2 3 4 5 6

(a) 4M=4 (b) 4M=16

0 0

-10 -10

-20 -20

-30 -30

-40 -40

-50 -50

-60 -60

-70 -70

-80 -80

-90 -90

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 0 1 2 3 4 5 6

(c) 4M=32 (d) 4M=128

Figure 5: Azimuth radiation patterms under different antenna numbers.

x 10
2

0
amplitude (dB )

-2

-4

-6

-8 0.6lambda

-10 0.9lambda
1.0lambda
-12
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6
angle(rad/s)

Figure 6: Pitchradiation patterns under different array radius.

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range in the simulation therefore it may lead to misjudgment. However, there is little false dismissal
probability to detect UAVs at the cost of high false alarm rate which can be ignored.
Figure 5 reveals the feature of the azimuth pattern function in condition that azimuth angle
is set as 30◦ and pitch is 90◦ constantly. The number of antennas influences the performance
that more antennas bring better radiation pattern effect. However, only analyzing the radiation
pattern based on azimuth angle may bring ±π fuzzy angle caused by periodicity of π. We choose
16 antennas when considering the cost and complexity of the whole system.
Figure 6 simulates the pitch radiation pattern function in condition that the pitch angle is 45◦
and 4M = 16 when the array radius is set as 0.6λ, 0.9λ and λ respectively. As shown, the result of
DBF is not an accurate value but a range including φ = 45◦ . 0.9λ is the most proper one because
of the minimum range. By analyzing the two functions synthetically, the periodic angle of fuzzy
can be solved.
4. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, this paper has proposed a system which utilizes passive radar array located close to
the base stations to receive and process the echoes of UAVs. A better detection performance for
weak UAVs can be achieved due to application of A-CFAR, DBF and judgement. By combining the
distance, direction and velocity information, the UAVs in certain scope can be monitored availably.
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