Power-Aperture Resource Allocation for a MPAR with Communications Capabilities

Multifunction phased array radars (MPARs) exploit the intrinsic flexibility of their active electronically steered array (ESA) to perform, at the same time, a multitude of operations, such as search, tracking, fire control, classification, and communications. This paper aims at addressing the MPAR resource allocation so as to satisfy the quality of service (QoS) demanded by both line of sight (LOS) and non line of sight (NLOS) search operations along with communications tasks. To this end, the ranges at which the cumulative detection probability and the channel capacity per bandwidth reach a desired value are introduced as task quality metrics for the search and communication functions, respectively. Then, to quantify the satisfaction level of each task, for each of them a bespoke utility function is defined to map the associated quality metric into the corresponding perceived utility. Hence, assigning different priority weights to each task, the resource allocation problem, in terms of radar power aperture (PAP) specification, is formulated as a constrained optimization problem whose solution optimizes the global radar QoS. Several simulations are conducted in scenarios of practical interest to prove the effectiveness of the approach.