Collaborative Power Allocation and Waveform Selection Strategy for Multi-Target Tracking in Airborne Radar System

In this paper, a collaborative power allocation and waveform selection strategy (CPA-WS) is developed for multi-target tracking (MTT) in airborne radar system. The mechanism of the proposed CPA-WS strategy is to collaboratively coordinate the velocity, heading angle, transmit power, waveform pulselength and bandwidth of the airborne radar, in order to achieve accurate target position estimation under the constraints of maneuverability performance and system resource budgets. The Bayesian Cramer-Rao lower bound (BCRLB) incorporating the above variables is derived to characterize the target tracking accuracy. Since the above parameters are coupled in the objective function, the resulting optimization problem is nonlinear and nonconvex, which is difficult to solve directly. Combined with cyclic minimization approach, an effective partition-based four-step method is proposed to solve the resulting problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CPA-WS strategy achieves the best MTT performance compared with other existing algorithms.