Adaptive PRI selection for tracking in clutter

In this paper, we consider a radar system capable of adaptively adjusting the pulse repetition interval (PRI) of its transmitted waveform. We propose an adaptive PRI selection algorithm that improves tracking performance in clutter scene. The problem of tracking a single target in clutter using only range measurement for simplicity is considered and a probabilistic data association filter (PDAF) is used. The algorithm selects the optimal PRI of next dwell to be transmitted by minimizing the average total mean square error (MSE) in the target estimate. A simulation example is given to compare the performance of a tracking system transmitting a variable PRI waveform with that of a conventional system transmitting a fixed PRI waveform. The simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.