Further analysis of waveform effects on tracking performance

The conventional approach for tracking system design is to treat the sensor and tracking subsystems as completely independent units. However, the two subsystems call be designed jointly to improve system (tracking) performance. It is known that different radar or sonar signal waveforms result in very different resolution cell shapes (for example, a rectangle versus an eccentric parallelogram), with corresponding differences in overall tracking performance. In a series of recent papers the authors have explored the waveform/trajectory estimation inter-relationship. Here the series is continued, and a number of new results are presented. Specifically, it is investigated: whether the variability in the measurement quality has a serious impact on estimation (apparently not); whether the use of a “mismatched” filter to account for low probability of detection in resolution cell corners is useful (it depends on the signal to noise ratio); and if there is a reason to consider adding frequency modulation to coding on pulses (there is). Perhaps most importantly, the value of the use of a measurement extraction system to reduce multiple detections caused by a single target is shown