Selection of the radar waveform from tracking considerations

The conventional approach for tracking system design is to treat the sensor and tracking subsystems as completely independent units. However, the two subsystems can be designed jointly to improve system (tracking) performance. It is known that different radar signal waveforms result in very different resolution cell shapes (for example, a rectangle versus an eccentric parallelogram) in the range/range-rate space, and that there are corresponding differences in overall tracking performance. We develop a framework for the analysis of this performance. An imperfect detection process, false alarms, target dynamics and the matched filter sampling grid are all accounted for, using the Markov chain approach of Li and Bar-Shalom (1991). The role of the grid is stressed, and it is seen that the measurement-extraction process from contiguous radar "hits" is very important. A number of conclusions are given, perhaps the most interesting of which is the corroboration in the new measurement space of Fitzgerald's (1974) result for delay-only (i.e., range) measurements, that a linear FM upsweep offers very good tracking performance.