Sensor Registration

The performance of a multi-sensor Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) is heavily dependent upon data from dispersed and disparate radars and other types of sensors. Timely and accurate fusion of data collected from a variety of radars and/or other sensors (EO/IR) is needed to track and discriminate the targets, providing kinematics and classification information. The use of a sensor network is motivated by the possibility of fusing a great amount of data taken by sensors that operate independently and have somewhat complementary features. Advantages of using a sensor network include greater volume of coverage and increase in system reliability and robustness. For a multi-sensor system, efficient sensor registration, sensor management and resource allocation are required to track and discriminate multiple targets successfully. A typical multi-sensor system has limited system resources, such as the sensing resources, and the bandwidth of the communication links between sensors and a central processing node. Therefore, it is important to manage the sensors in an efficient and collaborative way such that the tracking performance is maximized with the constrained system resources.