Risk-Aware Resource Allocation Strategy for Target Tracking in a Cognitive Radar Network

Cognitive radar has been developed to use feedback from its operating environment, obtained from a beam, to make resource allocation decisions by solving optimization problems. Previous works focused on target tracking accuracy by designing an evaluation metric for an optimization problem. However, in practical real-world scenarios, both the target tracking performance of cognitive radar and its operational perspective should be considered. In this study, the usage of an operational risk score in the allocation of radar resources is proposed for a cognitive radar framework. Resource allocation regarding radar dwell time is considered to reflect the operational significance of the target’s priority level. The dwell time allocation problem is solved through Second-Order Cone Programming (SOCP). Numerical simulations are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The results show that the proposed SOCP-based algorithm achieves comparable operational risk estimation performance to conventional methods while using fewer time resources, thereby improving overall resource efficiency in resource-constrained environments.