Array Scheduling With Power and Bandwidth Allocation for Simultaneous Multibeam Tracking Low-Angle Targets in a VHF-MIMO Radar

Abstract

The very high frequency (VHF) radar suffers from the multipath interference and false alarms when tracking low-angle targets. The co-located multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar technique can mitigate these adverse effects with waveform diversity. However, the limited resources restrict the potential of the VHF-MIMO radar. In this paper, an array scheduling with power and bandwidth allocation (ASPBA) strategy is proposed for the VHF-MIMO radar tracking low-angle targets. The predicted posterior Cramér-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) under the multipath interference and measurement origin uncertainty (MOU) effects is derived to serve as the optimization metric. The measurement amplitude information (AI) is incorporated into the PCRLB to facilitate target detection and tracking. It is shown that the ASPBA problem is a mixed integer programming and NP-hard problem, where the array, power, and bandwidth allocation variables are both coupled in the objective and constraints. An efficient three-stage-based solution is proposed for problem-solving. The approximated relationship among three variables is derived using Hölder's inequality, and an auxiliary variable is introduced to describe the array contribution. Thereby, the array scheduling is determined by a heuristic rounding algorithm, and the power and bandwidth allocation are achieved using the approximated relationship. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed ASPBA strategy, compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. It is also shown that the target height is a main factor that influences the resource allocation results in the low-angle tracking scenario.