RapidIO-based Space System Architectures for Synthetic Aperture Radar and Ground Moving Target Indicator

The design of space systems capable of performing realtime Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a significant challenge in HPEC due to the high processor, memory, and network requirements imposed by SAR. However, building a system to support SAR and other Space-Based Radar (SBR) algorithms simultaneously is an even greater challenge. This presentation describes simulation results from a SAR application executing in parallel on an embedded multiprocessor satellite system equipped with a RapidIO interconnection network. We consider several variations on RapidIO network parameters as well as parallel decompositions of the SBR algorithms to design a system to support SAR and Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) simultaneously. In addition, we describe our RapidIO testbed that is used to validate our network models and present results demonstrating the accuracy of our network models under varying traffic conditions.