Joint path planning and beampattern design for multitarget tracking in airborne radar system

In this paper, a joint path planning and beampattern (JPP-BD) strategy is proposed for multi-target tracking (MTT) in airborne colocated multiple-input multiple-output (C-MIMO) radar system. The key mechanism of the proposed strategy is to collaboratively coordinate the waveform correlation matrix (WCM), kinematic velocity and heading angle of the airborne radar, in order to improve MTT performance and low sidelobe performance under the constraints of maneuverability limitations and system resource budgets. The predictive Bayesian Cramér-Rao lower bound (BCRLB) and peak sidelobe level (PSL) are derived and adopted as the metrics to characterize the target tracking accuracy and low sidelobe performance, respectively. As the formulated JPP-BD problem is non-linear and non-convex, we propose a partition-based three-stage approach to solve it effectively. Simulation results show that the proposed JPP-BD strategy achieves the best system performance in comparison with other benchmarks.