Detection and Tracking of Rogue UASs Using a Novel Real-time Passive Radar System

Unlawful operations involving unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are raising concerns for the security of critical infrastructures as well as of crowded environments. In this work, a real-time bistatic passive radar (BPR) is proposed, established on software-defined radio (SDR) and signals of opportunity (SOPs), to counter unauthorized drone operations over critical infrastructures. Specifically, SOPs that are already available in the environment, e.g., digital video broadcasting terrestrial (DVB-T) signals, are employed and processed in real-time to provide simultaneous detection and tracking of rogue drones in the vicinity. Also, the advent of SDRs has provided the opportunity to develop a low-cost and versatile BPR solution. A prototype passive radar (PR) implementation is proposed, using embedded processing units, and a signal processing framework is applied to achieve the two-fold detection-and-tracking objective in real time. Through extensive outdoor experiments the performance of the proposed system is validated under various parameter settings.