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The compactness of the whole system is mainly based on standardized and shared
procedures for the identification of risk scenarios, for the surveys to be carried out, for
the procedures of each type of on-site testing, for data assimilation techniques, for the
different presentations of results, such as risk maps along the highway, landslides
susceptibility maps and so on.
The setting up of data acquisition, processing center and traffic control center are
the core of the integrated system. The Data Collecting and Processing Center (CAED)
acquires and processes data that are extremely variable in intensity, dimensions and
information content. The Control Center for Road Network (CCC) is meant to
integrate the scientific and the management aspects of hydrological risk monitoring
and early warning.
Several tests for experimentation and validation of the various part of the described
system are being carried out in three highway sections, situated in different Italian
Regions (Calabria, Sicily, Campania and Basilicata) interested by the Community
Support Framework.
The radar activities designed and developed in the “Areal monitoring system”
component of the LEWIS project are presented and tested in the following sections.
3
Software Defined Radar
Software Defined Radar (SDRadar [14-16]) represents a new challenge in radar
technology, due to the possibility of performing most of the basic operations (i.e.
mixing, filtering, modulation) by employing simple software modules, thus providing
a strong versatility in terms of signal generation and processing. Many scientists and
researchers are focusing their attention on SDRadar systems and many testbed and
applications have been developed by considering the Universal Software Radio
Peripheral (USRP) motherboard [17] as hardware base. In particular, Zhang et al.
proposed in [18] a measurement system for automotive applications based on
SDRadar, while in [19], the capability of the USRP technology is demonstrated in the
realization of a passive radar by designing a low-cost DVB-T software defined system
for costal ship detection. Fernandez et al. implement in [20] a SDRadar system able to
transmit and receive chirp waveforms by using MATLAB and Simulink to implement
the logic blocks, to process the received data and calculate the target range. In the
existing solutions mentioned above, a real compact SDRadar prototype is generally
missed, and only laboratory experiments are performed, adopting standard
instrumentations to simulate the SDRadar platform. Finally, the work in [21]
presented a measurement testbed for OFDM radar which uses USRPs as a front-end
to obtain car-to car distance, however, a low range resolution is achieved, and a high
direct coupling is produced, thus limiting the available dynamic range.
Starting with the outlined literature scenario, a software defined FMCW radar
architecture, improved in both terms of compactness and costs, has been developed at
University of Calabria to provide a novel solution for target detection with an
appropriate resolution. The proposed architecture is described in Fig. 2(a).
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