Statistical description of monopulse parameters for tracking Rayleigh targets

The conditional probability density function (pdf) is developed for each monopulse measurement of a Rayleigh target by conditioning the pdf of the complex monopulse ratio on the measured amplitude of the sum signal. The conditional pdf is used to develop the conditional Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) for any unbiased estimator of the direction-of-arrival (DOA). Conditional maximum likelihood (CML) and conditional method of moments (CMM) estimators of the DOA are developed along with estimates of the variances associated with the monopulse ratio and DOA estimate. Using simulation results, the performances of the CML and CMM estimators of the DOA are compared with the performance of standard monopulse ratio and the performances of the variance estimators are also studied.