Waveform libraries: Measures of effectiveness for radar scheduling

Implementing highly agile, software driven waveform generators, new radar transmitter concepts have emerged over the past decade. Such new capabilities have stimulated interest in exploiting agile transmitter capabilities. Although few demonstrations have been conducted on real radars or even test-bed systems, a significant corpus of theoretical and simulation results clearly indicates that waveform agility, if suitably applied, can yield highly substantial performance gains across different radar application scenarios. Most schemes introduced for exploiting waveform agility involve closed-loop waveform scheduling. Principled scheduling of waveforms in radar and other active sensing modalities is motivated by the nonexistence of any single waveform that is ideal for all situations encountered in typical operational scenarios. This then increases the possibility of achieving operationally significant performance gains through close-loop waveform scheduling.