Target tracking using range and RCS measurements in a MIMO radar network

It is evidenced that for a target of non-isotropic reflectivity, a radar range measurement may associated with a large variance due to the fluctuation of target RCS. A MIMO radar is able to observe a target from multiple directions and therefore is likely to capture the target scattering pattern via widely separated receivers. This paper considers the case of tracking a target using both range and RCS measurements collected from a MIMO radar network. The bistatic RCS measurements of a target are obtained from the amplitudes of received signal strength for each of the transmitting-receiving paths. A pre-calculated look-up table is used to take target reflectivity pattern into account for measuring the amplitude of received signal strength. The latter is assumed to be proportional to the RCS of a point target. The RCS measurement model are then incorporated with the bistatic range measurements for estimating the posterior probability density of the target by using a particle filter. The numerical results show that by incorporating target RCS measurement, the root mean square error performance of the estimate can be improved and the improvement is significant if a large number of well separated antennas are used in the MIMO radar network.