Personal mobile radars with millimeter-wave massive arrays for indoor mapping

The adoption of millimeter-wave technology could open the possibility to integrate massive antenna arrays inside future 5G user mobile devices, with the possibility to enable new interesting applications. Within this context, in this paper we put forth the concept of a personal mobile radar operating at millimeter-waves and consisting of a massive array for accurate environmental mapping. Frequency selectivity and phase quantization effects are accounted for to characterize the achievable angle and range resolution necessary to collect environmental information. Successively, we propose an effective grid-based Bayesian mapping approach by introducing a new state-space model, which profits of the beneficial effects of the massive antenna array characteristics. Numerical results show that the idea herein investigated is feasible, and that a significant mapping performance is attainable even employing coarse antenna arrays provided that the number of antenna elements is sufficiently high.