Compressed sensing radar surveillance networks

We study the problem of sensor fusion in a simplified radar surveillance application. A potentially large number of narrowband radars with isotropic antennas monitor a two-dimensional area for an unknown number of targets. We use techniques from compressive sensing to distribute efficient projections of network observations, allowing for reconstruction of the target scene using a single snapshot of sensor data. We avoid the use of a fusion node, allowing all radars to individually estimate target locations after iterative communication with neighboring sensors. We study the robustness of the discretization of continuous target locations, comparing estimation performance of basis pursuit reconstruction methods to a sparse estimator based on a model-robust formulation. We test the approach on simulated scenarios, showing tradeoffs in the resolution of target localization as well as the communication bandwidths required for this inter-radar cooperation scheme.