Sensor Management for Radar: a Tutorial

In this chapter we describe some of the ideas being pursued in sensor scheduling as they apply to radar. A modern phased-array pulseDoppler radar has several different parameters available for scheduling: waveform, beam-shape, beam direction, pulse repetition interval, etc. Choice of different values for these parameters provides different transmit modes for the radar and these modes in turn provide a variety of “blurrings” of the image of the scene. The application of ideas in scheduling to the different possible modes of the transmit phase of such a radar, has been shown in simulation to improve many aspects of the performance in tracking and detection of targets. We give a quick introduction to the ideas of radar followed by a discussion of some of the theoretical ideas involved, and with results of some simulations. We end with a discussion of the theoretical problem of scheduling the measurements and tracking of a one-dimensional system.