Software Defined Radar Platform Testbed

for Micro-Doppler Detection

In-sang-Woo, Jung-Soo Jung, *Myeong-Seok Park, Young-Kil Kwag
School of Electronics and Information Engineering, * Radar Research Institute
Korea Aerospace University, Goyang-City, Korea
iswoo@kau.ac.kr, jsjung@kau.ac.kr, mspark@ kau.ac.kr, ykwag@kau.ac.kr

AbstractThis paper presents the development results of

the software-defined radar (SDR) platform testbed. The SDR
platform consists of a RF and digital hardware modules as
well as reconfigurable software module. As a test result, the
spectrogram analysis shows that the micro-Doppler
signature of the small pendulum motion can be accurately
detected and discriminated using the developed SDR
platform testbed.
Index TermsSoftware Defined Radar (SDR), radar
system design, micro Doppler detection

I. INTRODUCTION
Software defined radar (SDR) has many advantages in
achieving a multipurpose radar system by re-using the RF
and signal processor hardware with a programmable
software. Due to its high flexibility, SDR platform can
perform various detection functions using a software
programming because the system is composed of the
reconfigurable hardware. Thus SDR makes faster
development and lower production costs in the radar
markets where conventional radars are dedicated to the
fixed mission and also relatively expensive. Based on the
potential capability of SDR, its applications can be
extended to various functions such as human motion,
detection, security, traffic monitoring, collision avoidance,
and micro motion detection [1] [ 2] [ 3] [4].

Fig. 1. Block diagram of SDR platform testbed

In this paper, a SDR platform development is presented

with the performance test results for a micro motion
detection. Architecture of the SDR platform testbed are
introduced in Section II, and the performance test
procedure is in Section III. The test results are discussed in
Section IV, and finally conclusions are made in section V.
II. ARCHITECTURE OF SDR PLATFORM TESTBED

The SDR system consists of a general RF module

and a reconfigurable software module. Radar
components, such as mixers, filters, modulators,
demodulators, and detectors, have been constructed in
the hardware. The components are implemented using
software on a PC, DSP or FPGA in SDR. The block
diagram of SDR testbed is presented in Figure 1.
Antenna and RF module are located in the analog signal
domain. Signal processor module and software module are
located in the digital signal domain. In this SDR platform
development, RF module and signal processing module
can be combined to form a transceiver. Detailed block
diagram of SDR transceiver is shown in Figure 2. RF
module consists of mixer, VCO PLL, BPF, LNA and
amplifier. Signal processing module consists of DAC,
ADC, DSP and FPGA.

Fig. 2. Detailed block diagram of SDR transceiver

Figure 3 shows the detailed S-band RF module which is

divided into two channels of transmitter chain and receiver
chain. Particularly, the receiver channel has a two input ports
from the antenna in order to use for the mono-static as well as
bi-static mode of radar operation in the particular radar
environment. Figure 4 shows the detailed digital signal
processing module which consists of direct IF receiver and
waveform generator, and signal processor board. The IF
frequency of 70MHz is directly sampled and separated into the
I/Q channels in the digital domain. The waveform generator
uses a DDS chip enabling to generate the arbitrary CW and
Pulse waveforms. The signal processor board using DSP and
FPGA is connected to the host PC through the high speed
Gigabit Ethernet. The operation mode can be displayed on the
monitor with GUI for user interface.

Table I shows the characteristics of the SDR platform

testbed. Reconfigurable capability enables user to generate
various waveform and apply various signal processing
algorithms depending on the various applications.
Table II shows the key specifications of the SDR testbed.
For this micro Doppler experimental application, the main
frequency is selected to S-band of 2.4 GHz range and its
bandwidth is 25MHz. The output power is limited to 10 mW
for the short range detection, along with the small patch
antenna gain of 8 dBi. The CW waveform is used for the micro
Doppler detection. The signal processor can receive the IF
frequency of 70MHz for direct digitization to generate the I/Q
signal in the processing board.

TABLE I.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SDR PLATFORM TESTBED

Item

Fig. 3. Detailed block diagram of RF Module

Characteristic

Remark

Waveform
Generation

Applying various
waveform

Pulse, CW,
FMCW, LFM, Etc.

Signal Processing

Applying various
algorithms

FFT,
CFAR,
Pulse
Compression,
Doppler
Filter, Target Estimation,
Etc.

Software

Various
expressions using
data acquisition

A-Scope, PPI, RX Signal,

Spectrogram, Etc.

Application Area

Educational Radar Tool

Security Radar
Surveillance Radar
Collision Avoidance Radar

TABLE II.
Subsystem

KEY SPECIFICATION OF SDR PLATFORM TESTBED

Parameter

Value

Gain

8 dBi

Beam Width

70

Frequency Range

24002483.5 MHz

Bandwidth

25 MHz

Output power

10 mW

Tx Frequency

200 MHz

DAC speed

400 MHz

DAC resolution

14 bit

Wave Type

CW, FMCW, LFM

Rx Frequency

70 MHz

Sampling Frequency

56 MHz

ADC sampling rate

125 MHz

ADC resolution

16 bit

Dynamic Range

80dBc

Processor Core

Dual ARM CortexA9

Note

Antenna

RF Module

Waveform
Generator

Signal
Processor
Module
Fig. 4. Detailed block diagram of Signal Processor Module

Pulse
Mode

Used
DDS

Figure 5 shows the hardware implementation of the SDR

platform testbed. Each RF and digital board are integrated into
the compact chasses with the small volume and light weight,
and the overall functional test is conducted in the laboratory.

Fig. 6. Experiment set-up for micro-Doppler detection

Fig. 7. Sphere pendulum for moving target

Fig. 5. Hardware implement of SDR platform Testbed

III. MICRO DOPPLER EXPERIMENT OF SDR TESTBED

Prior to the Doppler experiment of the SDR platform
testbed, the key functional test of detection range and velocity
measurement has been conducted using the reference corner
reflector target inside and outside of the laboratory. For the
main micro Doppler detection, a special test bench is needed to
be constructed for the accurate measurement of the micro
motion detection. Figure 6 shows an experimental set-up for
the micro-Doppler detection. The SDR radar with patch
antenna is placed at the distance of 4 meters from the moving
target on the turntable system in the laboratory. The
constructed moving sphere pendulum is used for the reference
target. This moving pendulum target system consists of one
metallic sphere hanging on the metallic cylinder moving
around the turntable as shown in Figure 7. In order to
discriminate micro Doppler component of the sphere pendulum
motion from that of the metallic cylinder motion as shown in
Figure 8, two different target and their motions are specified in
Table III. A cylinder target RCS of 0.125 m2 is comparable to
the tiny sphere reference RCS of 0.03 m2. The motion speed
and direction of each target is sensitive to the Doppler effect in
accurately measuring the difference between the reference
micro Doppler of pendulum target and the moving cylinder
target. The data acquisition rate and time can be adjusted
within 10 sec duration of the motion. The Doppler analysis is
performed using STFT (Short-Time Fourier Transform) and
Spectrogram function of the Matlab program.

Fig. 8. Discrimination of micro Doppler

TABLE III.
System

SDR
Testbed

PARAMETER VALUE IN EXPERIMENT SETTING

Parameter

Value

Observation distance

4m

Operation frequency

2.45 GHz

Waveform mode

CW

Output power

10 mW

Antenna gain

8 dBi

RCS
Cylinder
Target
Sphere

0.125 m2

Motion

Round-trip in 0.9 m line

Speed

0.3 m/s

RCS

0.031 m2

Motion
Oscillation
frequency

Pendulum motion
1.1 Hz

IV. PERFORMANCE RESULT

The micro Doppler data has been acquired and analyzed
using the SDR testbed in the test environment explained in
Section III. The target motion can be efficiently analyzed using
the spectrogram method simultaneously both in time and
frequency domain [3] [5]. The spectrogram of the cylinder
target motion is shown in Figure 9 (a). The motion Doppler is
detected due to the back-and-forth round-trip motion,
alternately showing the Doppler frequency changes of +/- 5 Hz
range during 3-second interval. These results well agree with
the theoretical Doppler data calculated in the motion speed of
0.3 m/s which is resulting in 4.9 Hz in the trace length of 0.9 m.
The spectrogram of the spheres pendulum motion is shown in
Figure 9(b). The resultant Doppler motion data shows almost 9
alternations in 10 second duration. These results are also well
matched to the calculated data whose pendulum length is 0.25
m and its corresponding frequency is 1 Hz. The trend of
Doppler peak is reducing over the time duration due to the
inevitable friction motion between string and axis. Finally, the
spectrogram of the simultaneous two target motion is shown in
Figure 9(c). There are three alternations at -5 Hz in the first 3second interval. This Doppler signature is corresponding to the
cylinders forward motion with three times of simultaneous
pendulum oscillation of the reference sphere target.

International Journal on Advances

Measurements, vol. 4, pp. 20-31, 2011

in

Systems

V. CONCLUSION
The development of the SDR platform testbed is presented
with the micro Doppler test performance. As a result, the
spectrogram analysis shows that the micro-Doppler signature
can be accurately detected and discriminated using the
pendulum micro motion of the metallic sphere hanged with the
cylinder motion target. It is verified that small micro motion
embedded in large motion target can be discriminated through
the spectrogram analysis.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was partly supported by the ICT R&D program
of MSIP/IITP (No. 14911-01004, SDR Radar Sensor Platform
Development) .
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Fig. 9. Spectrogram of the various target motion

and