An effective PSO-based power allocation for target tracking in MIMO radar with widely separated antennas

In MIMO radar with widely separated antennas, the antennas are spaced far from each other and the target is seen from different angles. In this type of radars, each receiver collects all transmit signals and transmits them to the central processor unit. Power allocation is an important part of military operations. Therefore, it is a primary factor that requires to be taken into account in the designing of target tracking problems in MIMO radar. In fact, the power allocation finds an optimum strategy to allot power to transmit antennas with the goal of minimizing the target tracking errors under specified transmit power constraints. In this paper, the performance of power allocation for target tracking in MIMO radar with widely separated antennas is investigated. For this purpose, first, a MIMO radar with distributed antennas is configured and a target motion model using the constant velocity (CV) method is modeled. Then Joint Cramer Rao bound (CRB) for target parameters (joint target position and velocity) estimation error is computed. This is applied as a power allocation problem objective function. Because a complex Gaussian model is considered for target radar cross-section (RCS), this function becomes complicated. Due to the nonlinearity of this objective function, the proposed power allocation problem is nonconvex. Therefore, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) -based power allocation algorithm is proposed to solve it. In simulation experiments, the performance of the proposed algorithm in different conditions such as a different number of antennas and antenna geometry configurations is evaluated. Results prove the validity of the proposed algorithm.