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.