In this paper, we investigate the problem of joint route optimization and multi-dimensional resource management for airborne radar network in target tracking application. The mechanism of the proposed joint route optimization and multidimensional resource management (JRO-MDRM) scheme is to adopt the optimization technique to collaboratively design the flight route, transmit power, dwell time, waveform bandwidth, and pulse length of each airborne radar node subject to the system kinematic limitations and several resource budgets, with the aim of simultaneously enhancing the target tracking accuracy and low probability of intercept (LPI) performance of the overall system. The predicted Bayesian Cramér-Rao lower bound (BCRLB) and probability of intercept are calculated and employed as the metrics to gauge the target tracking performance and LPI performance, respectively. It is shown that the resulting optimization problem is non-linear and non-convex, and the corresponding working parameters are coupled in both objective functions, which is generally intractable. By incorporating the particle swarm optimization (PSO) and cyclic minimization approaches, an efficient four-step solution algorithm is proposed to deal with the above problem. Extensive numerical results are provided to demonstrate the correctness and advantages of our developed scheme compared with other existing benchmarks.Index Terms-Joint route optimization and multi-dimensional resource management (JRO-MDRM), airborne radar network, target tracking, Bayesian Cramér-Rao lower bound (BCRLB), low probability of intercept (LPI), particle swarm optimization (PSO).
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Background and Literature ReviewWith the significant superiorities over the static radar systems, the airborne radar network has received considerable interests in various applications, such as air defence, missile guidance, cooperative navigation, target localization, and so