Receive-Beam Resource Allocation for Multiple Target Tracking With Distributed MIMO Radars

A distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system is capable of tracking multiple targets under the “defocused transmit-focused receive” (DTFR) operating mode, in which each transmitter forms a completely defocused beam to illuminate the whole surveillance region and each receiver adopts a focused beam to attain a higher resolution. However, when operating in this mode, there exists a resource optimization problem on the allocation of receive-beams. To address this problem, a receive-beam resource allocation (RBRA) strategy is proposed in this paper. The key mechanism is to implement the optimal allocation between receive-beams and targets based on the feedback information in the tracking recursion cycle, with the objective of improving the worst tracking accuracy with multiple targets. Since the posterior Cramér–Rao lower bound (PCRLB) provides a lower bound on the accuracy of target state estimates, it is derived and adopted as an optimization criterion. It is shown that the optimal RBRA is a multidimensional nonconvex assignment problem that is NP-hard. We propose an efficient convex relaxation optimization to solve it. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed strategy in terms of the worst case tracking root mean-square errors.