Bandwidth sharing and scan scheduling in multimodal radar with communications and tracking

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.