Joint Radar Scheduling and Beampattern Design for Multitarget Tracking in Netted Colocated MIMO Radar Systems

In this letter, a joint radar scheduling and beampattern design (JRSBD) strategy is proposed to track multiple targets by a netted colocated multiple-input multiple-output (C-MIMO) radar system in clutter. The mechanism is to jointly optimize the radar scheduling and the waveform correlation matrix of each C-MIMO radar to maximize the tracking performance. First, we develop the deterministic covariance, as the performance metric, to quantify the actual target state estimate accuracy. Second, the JRSBD strategy is formulated as an optimization problem with some system constraints. The resulting optimization problem contains both binary and continuous variables and is nonconvex. Finally, we propose a sequential convex programming method to solve it. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the JRSBD strategy can effectively improve the target tracking accuracy.