Design of Transmit Beamwidth and Dwell Time under K-Distributed Clutter and Gaussian Noise

This paper handles the problem of optimizing the scanning policy of a surveillance system in the presence of Rayleigh targets in a mixture of K-distributed clutter and Gaussian noise. Adopting the detection rate (DR) and false alarm rate (FAR) as performance measures, we show that the said optimization amounts to solving a constrained DR maximization, wherein the free parameters are the transmit beamwidth, the dwell time, and the detection threshold, whereas the constraints concern the maximum FAR and time on target. A thorough performance assessment is offered, aimed at eliciting the influence of the signal-to-noise and clutter-to-noise ratios, the clutter shape parameter, and the rate of change of the target response. The results indicate that, although a uniformly optimum transmit policy does not exist, some trends can be devised, which appears of particular relevance especially for systems that can avail themselves of some degree of cognition.