Energy Detection Performance with Massive Arrays for Personal Radars Applications

Abstract : The idea to adopt massive arrays for personal radars applications is facing a rapid growth, thanks to the high scanning resolution achievable with the large number of antennas employed. In fact, such multi-antenna systems enable the possibility to detect and localize surrounding objects through an accurate beamforming procedure. In this paper we show a classical energy-detection approach for target ranging and localization, where the threshold is designed according to the receiver noise only, since an ideal laser-beam antenna is considered. Successively, we show the ambiguities that could arise when the presence of side-lobes cannot be neglected (e.g., when considering real massive arrays instead of ideal pencil-beam like radiation patterns) and we propose a set of guidelines that can be followed from a system design point-of-view to overcome this issue.