Partial distributed beamforming design in passive radar sensor networks

摘要

In this papers we address the optimal power allocation problem in a distributed passive radar sensor network system, where closely located nodes are capable of distributed beamforming. In this setup, the network of sensor nodes is viewed as a combination of node clusters, where each cluster is capable of time synchronization, and coordinated transmission. The goal of the network is to provide a reliable estimation of a source signal, by collecting and combining the individual observations from the sensor nodes in a centralized node. In this regard, a minimum mean squared error (MMSE) problem is formulated for the class of unbiased estimators. As it is shown, the resulting problem can be formulated as a convex optimization problem, which is solvable with the standard numerical solvers. At the end, numerical simulations illustrate the effect of the different network parameters on the resulting performance, and a significant gain is observed by enabling the proposed distributed beamforming algorithm for multiple sensor clusters.