The application of the Cramer-Rao bound to estimates of radar return time-of-arrival for several target configurations

In this report, certain applications of the Cramer-Rao bound to problems in radar echo time-of-arrival estimation are presented. These applications encompass point target echos, two-point target echos, and distributed target echos. With respect to point targets and two-point targets, a modified Cramer-Rao bound is derived and the results are substantially tighter than those of the conventional Cramer-Rao bound. In applying the Cramer-Rao bound to distributed targets, a sampled-data formulation is presented and a numerical example corresponding to a wake parameter estimation problem is given to illustrate the results.