Power allocation strategy for target localization in distributed MIMO radar systems without previous position estimation

Distributed MIMO radar systems have demonstrated to offer enhanced target localization capabilities. Reasonable power allocation strategies are designed to motivate a maximal system potential. However, the existing power allocation strategies strongly depend on the accuracy of previous position estimation, which restricts the real-time applications. In this paper, we extend the existing works to a more general case of unknown previous position information. Since the Cramer-Rao lower bound is known to provide a tight lower bound on the error of any unbiased estimator, it is derived and then employed as the optimization metric. The proposed power allocation strategy is ultimately formulated as a minimax problem to minimize the maximum probability of localization estimation errors over the whole area. Numerical results demonstrate its superior performance.