Composed Resource Optimization for Multitarget Tracking in Active and Passive Radar Network

In this article, a composed resource optimization (CRO) scheme is developed for an active and passive radar network engaged in multiple target tracking (MTT). The motivation of the CRO scheme is to collaboratively optimize the transmit resources of active radars, as well as the receiving processing resources of passive radars, to improve the overall MTT performance. We utilize the predicted conditional Cramér–Rao lower bound to evaluate the impact of allocation strategies on tracking performance and formulate the CRO as a mixed-integer nonlinear program problem since the adaptable parameters w.r.t. the target selection process are in binary form. To solve the problem, we propose an alternating direction method of multiplier-based algorithm. This algorithm transforms the original problem into an equality constrained problem by introducing two auxiliary vectors. In such a case, the CRO problem can be tackled by alternately solving several simple subproblems. Specifically, the subproblem w.r.t. the resource vector is convex, and the subproblems w.r.t. the auxiliary vectors are separable. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CRO scheme outperforms the traditional allocation schemes in terms of MTT performance. In addition, the performance of the CRO scheme is close to the optimal performance provided by the exhaustive method, but the computation load of the CRO scheme is lower than that of the exhaustive method. Finally, physical interpretations are presented to support our conclusions.