Optimization model and online task interleaving scheduling algorithm for MIMO radar

Abstract As the preemptive single-machine scheduling problem, a variety of tasks, each of which consists of three phases: the transmit interval, the wait interval and the receive interval, to be performed by a single multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar within a finite time horizon needs the efficient scheduling algorithm. However, due to the special signal processing characteristics, traditional task scheduling algorithms for the phased array radar can’t be applied to the MIMO radar to release its full multifunctional potential. Additionally, the real-time demand of the radar system must be taken into consideration when designing scheduling algorithms. Therefore, the optimization task scheduling model is established and a novel heuristic task interleaving scheduling algorithm is proposed. The full MIMO radar task structure is considered in a way that the wait interval can be utilized to transmit or receive subtasks. In addition, in order to sufficiently make full use of each subtask, different transmit intervals are incorporated into a whole dwell and different receive intervals are overlapped. The proposed algorithm decomposes the task schedulability analysis into the time constraint analysis and the energy constraint analysis, and adaptively interleaves different kinds of tasks. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can provide better performance compared with the four existing scheduling algorithms while maintaining a reasonable runtime.