Joint estimation of target state and ionosphere state of over-the-horizon radar

This paper formulates a joint estimation problem of the fast-updating target movement and the intermittent-updating ionoshpere state of target tracking based on OTHR without the help of the vertical and oblique ionosondes. Here the uncertainty of the association among the multi-path target echoes, the interested target track, and multi-path propagation modes is represented by random coefficient matrices. Based on the lifting technique and the orthogonality principle, the multi-rate LMMSE estimator is derived and testified via the numerical example of single target tracking.