Resource allocation in MIMO radar with widely separated antennas for multi-target detection

In this paper, we optimize resource allocation to improve the detection performance of a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar with widely separated antennas. In particular, in the entire surveillance area, a MIMO radar can probe multiple targets in a flexible manner that each target is illuminated by certain transmit antennas with certain illumination time. Given that transmit antennas and total illumination time are limited, we allocate these two resources to improve the detection performance of multiple targets based on the performance metric of relative entropy. We propose three resource allocation schemes to solve antenna allocation problem, time allocation problem and antenna-time allocation problem, respectively. Numerical simulations show that over a large range of transmitted power, target fluctuations and target numbers, the antenna allocation scheme outperforms the time allocation scheme. The antenna-time allocation scheme, which optimizes both of antenna allocation and time allocation, achieves the most robust detection performance.