Research on Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Frequency-Agility Radar

Sensors (Basel). 2021 Nov 27;21(23):7931. doi: 10.3390/s21237931.

Abstract

Modern radar jamming scenarios are complex and changeable. In order to improve the adaptability of frequency-agile radar under complex environmental conditions, reinforcement learning (RL) is introduced into the radar anti-jamming research. There are two aspects of the radar system that do not obey with the Markov decision process (MDP), which is the basic theory of RL: Firstly, the radar cannot confirm the interference rules of the jammer in advance, resulting in unclear environmental boundaries; secondly, the radar has frequency-agility characteristics, which does not meet the sequence change requirements of the MDP. As the existing RL algorithm is directly applied to the radar system, there would be problems, such as low sample utilization rate, poor computational efficiency and large error oscillation amplitude. In this paper, an adaptive frequency agile radar anti-jamming efficient RL model is proposed. First, a radar-jammer system model based on Markov game (MG) established, and the Nash equilibrium point determined and set as a dynamic environment boundary. Subsequently, the state and behavioral structure of RL model is improved to be suitable for processing frequency-agile data. Experiments that our proposal effectively the anti-jamming performance and efficiency of frequency-agile radar.

Keywords: Markov decision process (MDP); Markov game (MG); frequency-agility radar; radar anti-jamming; reinforcement learning (RL).