Sensor scheduling for target tracking in large multistatic sonobuoy fields

Sonobuoy fields, consisting of many distributed emitter and receiver sonar sensors on buoys, are used to seek and track underwater targets in a defined search area. A sensor scheduling algorithm is required in order to optimise tracking performance by selecting which emitter sonobuoy should transmit in each time interval, and which waveform it should use. In this paper we describe a new long term sensor scheduling algorithm for sonobuoy fields, called the continuous probability states algorithm. This algorithm reduces the scheduling search space by keeping track of the probability that a target is undetected, rather than modelling all possible detection outcomes, which reduces the computation complexity of the algorithm. It is shown that this approach results in high quality tracking for multiple targets in a simulated sonobuoy field.