Joint Energy Detection and Massive Array Design for Localization and Mapping

The adoption of massive arrays for simultaneous localization and mapping or personal radar applications enables the possibility to detect and localize surrounding objects through an accurate beamforming procedure. Unfortunately, when a classical constant false alarm rate approach accounting for ideal-pencil beam pattern is adopted, ambiguities in signal detection could arise due to the presence of side-lobes which can cause non-negligible errors in target detection and ranging. To counteract such effect, in this paper we propose a joint threshold-array design approach, where the antenna characteristics are taken into account to best set the threshold and to guarantee the desired detection and ranging performance at the non-coherent receiver section. In order to consider realistic arrays impairments, we focus our attention on the number of antenna elements and of phase shifter bits used for beamforming as key players in defining a trade-off between structural complexity, well-defined radiation pattern, and localization performance. Simulation and measurement results show that the number of bits per phase shifter can be relaxed in favor of a simpler array design, if the number of antennas is sufficiently high and the side-lobes are kept within a suitable level allowing a desired robustness to interference signals.