Resource Scheduling for Distributed Multi-Target Tracking in Netted Colocated MIMO Radar Systems

Abstract

In this paper, an effective solution is proposed for joint beam and power scheduling (JBPS) in the netted Colocated MIMO (C-MIMO) radar systems for distributed multi-target tracking (MTT). At its core, the proposed solution includes a distributed fusion architecture that reduces the communication requirements while maintaining the overall robustness of the system. The distributed fusion architecture employs the covariance intersection (CI) fusion to address the unknown information correlations among radar nodes. Each C-MIMO radar node in the network can generate a time-varying number of beams with controllable transmitting power by waveform synthesis, thus is capable of accomplishing multiple tracking tasks simultaneously. To maximize the global MTT performance of the radar network, the proposed JBPS solution implements an online resource scheduling, regarding both the generated beams and the transmitted power of all radar nodes, based on the feedback of the MTT results. A scaled accuracy-based objective function is designed to quantify the global MTT performance while properly taking into account different target priorities on resource allocation. The Bayesian Cramer-Rao lower bound (BCRLB) for CI fusion rule is derived and utilized as the constituent of the objective function since it provides a lower bound on the accuracy of the target state estimates. As the formulated JBPS problem is non-convex, we propose a fast reward-based iterative descending approach to solve it effectively. Numerical results show that the proposed JBPS can deliver superior performance in terms of maximizing the overall MTT performance while possessing high flexibility on the resource allocation regarding different target priorities.