Time-Domain and Monostatic-like Frequency-Domain Methods for Bistatic SAR Simulation

In recent years, an increasing interest has been devoted to bistatic SAR configurations, which can be effectively used to improve system performance and/or to increase the amount of physical information retrievable from the observed scene. Within this context, the availability of simulation tools is of paramount importance, for both mission planning and processing algorithm verification and testing. In this paper, a time domain simulator useful to obtain the point-spread function and the raw signal for the generic bistatic SAR configuration is presented. Moreover, we focus on the case of two bistatic configurations, which are of considerable interest in actual SAR applications, i.e., the translational invariant SAR and the one-stationary SAR acquisition geometries, for which we obtain meaningful expressions of the Transfer Functions. In particular, these expressions are formally equal to those obtained for the monostatic SAR configuration, so that the already available monostatic simulator can be easily adapted to these bistatic cases. The point-target raw signals obtained using the (exact) time domain simulator and the (approximated) frequency domain one are compared, with special attention to acquisition geometries that may be of practical interest in Formation-Flying SAR applications. Results show that the phase difference between raw signals simulated with the two approaches is, in all cases, smaller (and often much smaller) than about 10 degrees, except that at the very edge of the raw signals, where however, it does not exceed about 50 degrees.