Bandwidth Sharing and Scan Scheduling in Multimodal Radar with Communications and Tracking

Abstract

This paper addresses two issues related to multi-functional radio frequency (RF) systems: Bandwidth sharing between radar surveillance and communications, and scan scheduling during radar surveillance and radar tracking. Bandwidth is a very scarce commodity which must be managed with diligence for optimal system performance. Multi-objective optimization is used to arrive at solutions making the best use of available bandwidth between radar and communications. Bandwidth allocation for radar is based on the need to unambiguously resolve various scattering features of the target and their spatial arrangement. We divide the surveillance space into angular sectors and use fuzzy logic to arrive at priorities for each sector. We also consider the problem of scan scheduling between tracking and surveillance modes for the multimodal radar and introduce the concept of partial passes to increase the number of visits for tracking sectors. Static radar scheduling methods are used for specific target scenarios, while dynamic radar scheduling is introduced to periodically adapt the algorithm to the current target scenario. The algorithms are applied for representative target scenarios. Tracking is performed using the particle filter algorithm. The scheduling algorithms are analyzed using key performance parameters.

Keywords:

• Bandwidth optimization
• Multi-functional radio frequency systems
• Particle filter
• Radar scheduling
• Task priority

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Surendra S. Bhat

Surendra S. Bhat received his B.E. in Electronics Engineering from Mumbai University, India in 2002 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 2012. During 2002–2008, he was employed as a Software Engineer at various firms. He is currently employed at VMWare in Palo Alto, CA, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Ram M. Narayanan

Ram M. Narayanan received his B.Tech. from IIT Chennai in 1976 and his Ph.D. from University of Massachusetts in 1988. He was a Design Engineer in BEL Ghaziabad (1976–1983) and a faculty member at University of Nebraska (1988–2003). He is currently Professor of Electrical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. His interests are UWB radar systems and applications, radar networking, microwave tomography, and RF tags. He is a Fellow of IETE, IEEE, and SPIE. E-mail: [email protected]

Muralidhar Rangaswamy

Muralidhar Rangaswamy received his B.E. in Electronics Engineering from Bangalore University, in 1985 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Syracuse University in 1992. He is presently Technical Advisor for the RF Exploitation Technology Branch within the Sensors Directorate of the US Air Force Research Laboratory. His interests include radar signal processing, spectrum estimation, and statistical communication theory. He is the editor for radar for the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. He is Fellow of IEEE. E-mail: [email protected]