Multiple event detection for multistatic radar in the presence of non-ideal channels: Modulation and power control

We study the distributed detection of multiple hypotheses via a multistatic radar system where N geographically separated radar receivers communicate their local decisions to a fusion center over an orthogonal multiple access channel. Due to the availability of only limited bandwidth to the fusion center, each receiver forwards a locally processed information compressed to a few bits. Each receiver observes multiple signals, each of which is associated with K different binary hypothesis testing problems, and then makes K binary decisions, 0 or 1, for each test. The resulting bit sequence is transferred to a fusion center over an additive white Gaussian channel using an uncoded digital modulation technique. The fusion center uses the signals received from radar receivers and makes the final decision for each event. We analyze the impact of modulation and power control on the detection performance of multiple events, and determine the power-detection rate performance for various uncoded modulation schemes. We also investigate the use of hierarchical modulation to achieve some desired power-detection rate region for the proposed scheme. It is shown via simulations that one can achieve desired detection performance trade-off among different hypothesis testing problems by varying local decision rules, modulation and power control setting and constellation selection.