Internship / Working Student in Electrical Engineering / Computer Science or similar (w/m/d)

Passive radars, in contrast to active ones, do not transmit a dedicated electromagnetic signal, exploiting instead electromagnetic signals emitted by other opportunistic transmission sources in the environment (so called transmitters of opportunity). The corresponding signals of opportunity can be commercial broadcast or communications/navigation signals. Doing this has several advantages, such as: cost effectiveness, not needing a license to operate, zero electromagnetic pollution, and the so-called covert operation. However, all these advantages come at the cost of an increased signal processing complexity as well as the uncertainty arising from the lack of control over the transmitter.

In our research group, we are investigating the possibility of using passive radars for enabling non-cooperative situational awareness and collision avoidance between civil aviation airplanes, in particular, by employing global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals as signals of opportunity, as depicted in the figure below. To this end, we developed a radar simulator that generates the corresponding direct and reflected signals, allowing us to analyze the characteristics of the scenario and develop the necessary signal processing to be applied to these signals. As a next step, we are interested in improving the simulator by making it more flexible and efficient, such that to allow for analyzing new scenarios, as well as extending the corresponding radar signal processing chain.

This position would therefore entail the development of new features of the simulator and of the associated processing, such as the radar tracking, as well as the improvement of the flexibility, complexity, and the efficiency of the already developed software.