Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Antennas and Propagation Volume 2013, Article ID 261230, 21 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/261230 Research Article Array Processing for Radar: Achievements and Challenges Ulrich Nickel Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics (FKIE), Fraunhoferstrasse 20, 53343 Wachtberg, Germany Correspondence should be addressed to Ulrich Nickel;
[email protected] Received 26 March 2013; Accepted 26 July 2013 Academic Editor: Hang Hu Copyright © 2013 Ulrich Nickel. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Array processing for radar is well established in the literature, but only few of these algorithms have been implemented in real systems. The reason may be that the impact of these algorithms on the overall system must be well understood. For a successful implementation of array processing methods exploiting the full potential, the desired radar task has to be considered and all processing necessary for this task has to be eventually adapted. In this tutorial paper, we point out several viewpoints which are relevant in this context: the restrictions and the potential provided by different array configurations, the predictability of the transmission function of the array, the constraints for adaptive beamforming, the inclusion of monopulse, detection and tracking into the adaptive beamforming concept, and the assessment of superresolution methods with respect to their application in a radar system. The problems and achieved results are illustrated by examples from previous publications. 1. Introduction between array processing and preceding and subsequent radar processing.