A New Power Allocation Optimization for one Target Tracking in Widely Separated MIMO Radar

In this paper, a new power allocation scheme for one target tracking in MIMO radar with widely dispersed antennas is designed. This kind of radar applies multiple antennas which are deployed widely dispersed from each other. Therefore, a target is observed simultaneously from different uncorrelated angles and it offers spatial diversity. In this radar, a target’s radar cross section (RCS) is different in each transmit-receive path. So, a random complex Gaussian RCS is supposed for one target. Power allocation is used to allocate the optimum power to each transmit antenna and avoid illuminating the extra power in the environment and hiding it from interception. This manuscript aims to minimize the target tracking error with constraints on total transmit power and the power of each transmit antenna. For calculation of target tracking error, the joint Cramer Rao bound for a target velocity and position is computed and this is assumed as an objective function of the problem. It should be noted that a target RCS is also considered as unknown parameter and it is estimated along with target parameters. This makes a problem more similar to real conditions. After the investigation of the problem convexity, the problem is solved by particle swarm optimization (PSO) and sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithms. Then, various scenarios are simulated to evaluate the proposed scheme. The simulation results validate the accuracy and the effectiveness of the power allocation structure for target tracking in MIMO radar with widely separated antennas.