Simultaneous multiple high-precision beam scheduling for multitarget tracking

Due to the enhanced beam flexibility and improved tracking performance, the colocated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar technology has been increasingly adopted in multifunction radar (MFR) systems. The use of narrow beamwidths in high-precision radar systems increases the likelihood of missed illuminations, violating conventional tracking assumptions and challenging existing beam scheduling methods. In order to address the narrow-beam problem, a Gaussian mixture (GM) filtering method is proposed, which refines the target state distribution using the information obtained from missed detections. Based on the proposed filter, a beam steering strategy is introduced to enable rapid target localization. To predict the tracking performance for multitarget tracking (MTT) with narrow beamwidths, the multiple hypothesis posterior Cramér-Rao lower bound (MH-PCRLB) is derived. Taking advantage of the proposed MH-PCRLB, the narrow-beam scheduling problem is formulated as a mathematical optimization. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed filtering method, beam steering strategy and the beam scheduling approach.