Information theoretic radar waveform design for multiple targets

Abstract

In this paper we describe the optimization of an information theoretic criterion for radar waveform design. The method is used to design radar waveforms suitable for simultaneously estimating and tracking parameters of multiple targets. Our approach generalizes the information theoretic water-filling approach of Bell. The paper has two main contributions. First, a new information theoretic design criterion for designing multiple waveforms under a joint power constraint when beamforming is used both at transmitter and receiver. Then we provide a highly efficient algorithm for optimizing the transmitted waveforms, by approximating the information theoretic cost function. We show that using Lagrange relaxation the optimization problem can be decoupled into a parallel set of low-dimensional search problems at each frequency, with dimension defined by the number of targets instead of the number of frequency bands used.