Deployment of Distributed Radar Network

Radar sensors are traditionally used for air surveillance (e.g. weather or air-traffic control) in environments which do not contain many obstacles that block the transmitted radio waves. However, there is an increase of interest for deploying radar systems in environments which do contain many obstacles (e.g. urban). When an obstacle is reflecting the transmitted wave, the sensor coverage is reduced and shadow regions arise. Objects cannot be detected or tracked in shadow regions by the radar. A solution to overcome this problem is to deploy multiple radar system simultaneously in the environment. In this case, if an area is not covered by the first radar, it could be covered by another radar. However, deploying multiple radars can become expensive, thus the number of radar systems has to be reduced to a minimum, but in such a way that still sufficient coverage is provided. Optimizing the coverage can be executed during initial deployment, but also during operation (i.e. re-locating during run-time). Solving this coverage problem for radar systems is not a trivial task.

Initial reading: Bang Wang "Coverage Control in Sensor Networks", Springer, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84996-058-8

Assignment

The proposed project has the goal to develop, implement and test (in MATLAB) radar networks, environments and utility functions. The research will start with a study of existing sensor network coverage algorithms and their applicability for radar sensors. After this, radar models and utility functions should be developed and tested. The complexity of the used models can be increased to increase realism (e.g. take into account heavy clutter, multipath propagation effects). In the end, (new or existing) algorithm(s) should be employed to solve this coverage problem in an efficient manner.

Requirements

MATLAB, optimization algorithms, radar basics

Contact

dr. Oleg Krasnov

Microwave Sensing, Signals and Systems Group

Department of Microelectronics

Last modified: 2020-09-23