Optimal transmitter and receiver placement for localizing 2D interested-region target with constrained sensor regions

This paper presents a new transmitter and receiver placement method for sensing a target in a region of interest with distributed multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar systems. Since the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is the standard measurement for target localization accuracy, this paper divides the region of interest into grid points and formulates the transmitter and receiver placement problem via the minimax criterion. Thus we can ensure that the joint (x, y) CRLB corresponding to each grid point of the interested region is sufficiently small. To tackle such a nonconvex and nonlinear problem, we apply the alternating direction method of multipliers to divide the difficult problem into several solvable subproblems, respectively, with fewer variables. We also extend the algorithm to the separate (x, y) CRLB-based sensor placement problem and continuous distribution of uncertain target. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithms are efficient methods for transmitter and receiver placement in distributed MIMO radar systems.