Space-borne SAR Raw Signal Parallel Simulation

Space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) raw signal simulation is a powerfultool for high resolution imaging algorithm validation and SAR system performanceevaluation. Therefore research of Space-borne SAR raw signal simulation technique isimportant for Space-borne SAR system design. Space-borne SAR raw signalsimulation is a complex process with huge amount of mathematic computing involved.In this paper, parallel computing techniques are applied to Space-borne SAR rawsignal simulation. Experiment results show that the simulation process is greatlyexpedited.In general, the contribution of this paper can be summarized as follows:(1) A sequential method of Space-borne SAR raw signal simulation is presented,which uses precise satellite-ground space geometric model to describe therelative location and movement between radar and targets. The model includesellipsoid earth model,elliptical satellite orbit model and six reference frames.RFPC is adopted for SAR raw signal generation. The simulation method is atotal solution for both point target simulation and Distributed targetssimulation, whose execution flow is given in details(2) Three parallel methods of Space-borne SAR raw signal simulation arepresented. SGI ORIGIN 300 server is utilized to complete the research. Thispaper firstly describes the characteristics of the server and some basicknowledge of parallel computing. And then carries out the parallelparallelizability analysis. Based on the analysis results, three parallel methodsare presented, which utilize OpenMP, MPI, Pthread respectively. Pseudocodesof the three methods are given. Simulation results prove that the parallelsimulation methods are highly effective, which greatly speedup the simulation process.