High-Precision Beam Selection and Scheduling for Multitarget Tracking in Netted Phased Array Radar Systems

Advances in phased array radar (PAR) technology have enabled modern radar systems to control beams with extreme agility. In multitarget tracking (MTT) scenarios, efficient allocation of beam resources is essential to maintain optimal tracking performance. High-precision radar systems often employ narrow beams to achieve superior angular accuracy. However, the use of narrow beams increases the chance of target miss-detections, thereby violating conventional tracking assumptions and challenging existing beam scheduling methods. To address the narrow-beam effect, a filter-based beam steering approach is proposed, which leverages the information of missed detections to facilitate rapid target localization. The expected posterior entropy reduction (EPER) associated with the narrow-beam steering is derived and an approximation method is proposed to enable its application in beam scheduling. Furthermore, an optimization framework and a corresponding solution technique are proposed for joint beamwidth selection and narrow-beam scheduling for MTT. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheduler.