Measures of effectiveness for waveform selection

Modern phased array radars, with flexible waveform generation and beam steering capability, are able to adapt their performance to a variety of environments. The ultimate goal of our work is to “close the loop” in radar signal processing by producing algorithms for scheduling beam directions, beam shapes, waveforms and other radar modalities so as to optimally extract information from the environment. In order to achieve this goal several tasks must be performed. Briefly these are: 1) estimate the total environment (clutter and targets); 2) assess the effectiveness of a given modality in a given environment; and 3) select the optimal modality for each of a number of future epochs. This paper concentrates on the performance of the second task when the goal is optimal waveform scheduling. That is, we examine a method for measuring the effectiveness of waveforms in sampling an environment for which an estimate is available.