Target Track Pulse Scheduling

The problem of scheduling radar tracking pulses in a dense target environment where the position estimation error must be constrained to avoid false return with track correlations is considered. The problem is to schedule n fixed energy pulses such that the rangerate error is minimized at some final time subject to the constraint that the position error will be smaller than some value for the whole time interval. For a fixed time interval, the problem of finding the minimum number of radar measurements required to satisfy the position estimation error constraint is solved. A closed-form solution for the optimum schedule is given in the case where the number of pulses is equal to the minimum number of pulses. For cases where one extra pulse is available, a solution method is described and an algorithm is derived.