Performance and Requirements of GEO SAR Systems in the Presence of Radio Frequency Interferences

Geosynchronous Synthetic Aperture Radar (GEO SAR) is a possible next generation SAR system, which has the excellent performance of less than one-day revisit and hundreds of kilometres coverage. However, Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a serious problem, because the specified primary allocation frequencies are shared by the increasing number of microwave devices. More seriously, as the high orbit of GEO SAR makes the system have a very large imaging swath, the RFI signals all over the illuminated continent will interfere and deteriorate the GEO SAR signal. Aimed at the RFI impact in GEO SAR case, this paper focuses on the performance evaluation and the system design requirement of GEO SAR in the presence of RFI impact. Under the RFI impact, Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) and the required power are theoretically deduced both for the ground RFI and the bistatic scattering RFI cases. Based on the theoretical analysis, performance evaluations of the GEO SAR design examples in the presence of RFI are conducted. The results show that higher RFI intensity and lower working frequency will make the GEO SAR have a higher power requirement for compensating the RFI impact. Moreover, specular RFI bistatic scattering will give rise to the extremely serious impact on GEO SAR, which needs incredible power requirements for compensations. At last, real RFI signal behaviours and statistical analyses based on the SMOS satellite, Beidou-2 navigation satellite and Sentinel-1 A data have been given in the appendix.