This paper describes a methodological analysis of the Brillouin precursor formation to understand the impairments undergone by like-noise and random noise waveforms propagating through naturally dispersive media commonly found in radar applications. By means of a frequency-domain methodology based on considering the frequency response of the medium under study, the effect of these dispersive media on the evolution of an input signal can be seen as frequency filtering. The simulations were performed at a center frequency of 1.5 GHz and for a signal bandwidth of 3 GHz. Four random noise signals were considered: Barker codes, PRBS codes, Frank codes, Costas codes and additive white Gaussian noise. The experienced impairments were assessed in terms of cross-correlation function (CCF) degradation. The differences in the behavior of each type of phase and frequency coded signal to face the dispersive propagation have been demonstrated in terms of parameters used for information retrieval: peak amplitude decay, CCF secondary sidelobe level and multipath detectability. Finally, a frequency filtering approach is proposed to mitigate the impairments due to dispersive propagation under multipath conditions.
Keywords: binary code; correlation function; dispersive propagation; frequency domain; mitigation; multipath; random noise; sidelobe.