This paper investigates distributed tracking with range-Doppler coupling, where a range measurement of a target of interest is linearly biased by its range-rate (or Doppler). The coupling parameter ¸ can be zero, positive, or negative. The posterior Cramer´-Rao bound (PCRB) is derived for distributed radar systems: multistatic and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) settings. In the multistatic case, a positive ¸ leads to the lowest PCRB, the same as is true for monostatic tracking. The paper also compares the tracking performance of multistatic and MIMO configurations, where the latter utilizes two waveforms with §¸ parameters, respectively.

Regarding the power-unlimited case, a MIMO radar can always outperform a multistatic one from a tracking perspective. However, if the total power is limited, the situation is somewhat different: the transmitter co-located configuration is worse than a multistatic one, while in the widely-separated case the better choice depends on geometry.