SQP-based Power Allocation Strategy for Target Tracking in MIMO Radar Network with Widely Separated Antennas

Abstract

MIMO radar with widely separated antennas enhances detection and estimation resolution by utilizing the diversity of the propagation path. Each antenna of this type of radar can steer its beam independently towards any direction as an independent transmitter. However, the joint processing of signals for transmission and reception differs this radar from the multistatic radar. There are many resource optimization problems which improve the performance of MIMO radar. But power allocation is one of the most interesting resource optimization problems. The power allocation finds an optimum strategy to assign power to transmit antennas with the aim of minimizing the target tracking errors under specified transmit power constraints. In this study, the performance of power allocation for target tracking in MIMO radar with widely separated antennas is investigated. Therefore, a MIMO radar with distributed antennas is configured and a target motion model using the constant velocity (CV) method is modeled. Then Joint Cramer Rao bound (CRB) for target parameters (joint target position and velocity) estimation error is calculated. This is utilized as a power allocation problem objective function. Since the proposed power allocation problem is nonconvex. Therefore, a SQP-based power allocation algorithm is proposed to solve it. In simulation results, the performance of the proposed algorithm in various conditions such as a different number of antennas and antenna geometry configurations is examined. Results affirm the accuracy of the proposed algorithm.