Lifetime and power consumption optimization for distributed passive radar systems

In this paper we address the power allocation problem for a system of distributed passive radar sensor network, where the location of the source is relatively constant, aiming at lifetime maximization and power consumption minimization. It is known that for a network in which the source location changes independently at each observation step, a nearly-optimal strategy can be obtained by minimizing the network power consumption at each iteration independently from other iterations. In this paper, we observe that this is not the case for a network with a constant source location. The reason is that for the latter case, the power of the nodes with good location will be expired very fast which leads to a significantly shorter network lifetime. In order to mitigate this effect, we propose a weighted sum-power minimization strategy which effectively reduces the gap with the optimal power allocation scenario, when the network resources are scarce. The numerical simulations compare the behavior of both strategies for various network conditions.