Resource Allocation for Multi-target Tracking in Multi-static Radar Systems with Imperfect Detection Performance

In this paper, by considering an imperfect detection environment, a joint node selection and power allocation (JNPA) strategy for multi-static radar (MSR) system with the task of multi-target tracking (MTT) is proposed. Current resource allocation works are often studied based on an ideal detection precondition that the sensors detect targets with the probability of detection ( PD) equals to 1. It is practically impossible to achieve due to the influence of signal radiation attenuation and fluctuating of target amplitudes. To address this drawback, the proposed JNPA takes the practical case where PD ≤ 1 into consideration. The centralized fusion framework is adopted by the MSR to obtain the global MTT results. Accordingly, the posterior Cramér-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) with PD ≤ 1 is derived and utilized as the tracking performance metric of single target. Then, an overall cost function (OCF) is established to describe the global MTT performance. By utilizing the OCF as the objective function and combining with system resource constraints, the JNPA is formulated as an optimization problem. The optimization problem is non-convex. Next, we propose a two-step method to solve it. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed JNPA strategy.