Analysis on the Impact of a Clustered Multistatic Radar Network on Target Localization Accuracy

Target detection by a multistatic radar system involves simultaneous measurements from multiple transmitter-receiver pairs to estimate a target’s location. In order to evaluate the measurements received by the sensors, the sensors need to communicate with each other to transmit the measurements for example to a central processing node. A network consisting of moving sensors can only employ wireless communication links. However, wireless communication between sensors and a central processing node increases the probability of interception, which leads to a greater risk of detection and potentially the location of the individual sensors. A strategy, where receivers, that are spatially close to each other, are grouped to create a cluster, could potentially mitigate these issues by employing local processing within a cluster. This involves that measurements are distributed only within the cluster and the processed measurements are transmitted from one sensor within the cluster to the central processing node, thus the number of communication links between the central processing node and the sensors is minimized. In this paper, we investigate the performance of target localization accuracy using various performance metrics, such as the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound, the position estimation error, and the localization uncertainty area. It is shown that grouping the receivers in clusters leads to a decrease in target localization accuracy.