Decision support for wireless environments with applications to radar systems

Abstract

This thesis introduces a framework for providing decision support for systems in wireless environments. The decision support framework utilizes game-theoretic principles to produce a metric, known as utility, that quantifies the expected benefit of executing an action for given environmental variables. From a set of utility values, a set of corresponding actions can be ranked from most to least advisable, providing an objective means to determine the optimal action under the given constraints. In the first section, the decision support framework and its major components are introduced and their purpose explained. In the second section, an adapted version of the framework is applied to the problem of electronic warfare (EW). This section highlights the design choices that were made to implement the framework so that, under various simplifying assumptions, decision support could be provided to a radar jammer. The third section introduces a simulated non-cooperative game between two players – an emitter and a jammer – in which each player attempts to maximize its own utility. Each player makes decisions using a MATLAB implementation of the decision support framework as it was adapted for electronic warfare. The game is simulated for multiple initial conditions with the actions of the players being recorded, and those results are used to show that the players behave in a rational manner. This work concludes with an analysis of the results obtained in the simulations and a brief discussion of how future work could improve the framework’s design.