No Arabic abstract
This paper addresses the standard generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) detection problem of weak signals in background noise. In so doing, we consider a nonfluctuating target embedded in complex white Gaussian noise (CWGN), in which the amplitude of the target echo and the noise power are assumed to be unknown. Important works have analyzed the performance for the referred scenario and proposed GLRT-based detectors. Such detectors are projected at an early stage (i.e., prior to the formation of a post-beamforming scalar waveform), thereby imposing high demands on hardware, processing, and data storage. From a hardware perspective, most radar systems fail to meet these strong requirements. In fact, due to hardware and computational constraints, most radars use a combination of analog and digital beamformers (sums) before any estimation or further pre-processing. The rationale behind this study is to derive a GLRT detector that meets the hardware and system requirements. In this work, we design and analyze a more practical and easy-to-implement GLRT detector, which is projected after the analog beamforming. The performance of the proposed detector is analyzed and the probabilities of detection (PD) and false alarm (PFA) are derived in closed form. Moreover, we show that in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the post-beamforming GLRT detector performs better than both the classic pre-beamforming GLRT detector and the square-law detector. This finding suggests that if the signals are weak, instead of processing the signals separately, we first must to reinforce the overall signal and then assembling the systems detection statistic. At last, the SNR losses are quantified, in which the superiority of the post-beamforming GLRT detector was evidenced as the number of antennas and samples increase.
The design of a conical phased array antenna for air traffic control (ATC) radar systems is addressed in this work. The array, characterized by a fully digital beam-forming (DBF) architecture, is composed of equal vertical modules consisting of linear sparse arrays able to generate on receive multiple instantaneous beams pointing along different elevation directions. The synthesis problem is cast in the Compressive Sensing (CS) framework to achieve the best trade-off between the antenna complexity (i.e., minimum number of array elements and/or radio frequency components) and radiation performance (i.e., matching of a set of reference patterns). Towards this aim, the positions of the array elements and the set of complex element excitations of each beam are jointly defined through a customized CS-based optimization tool. Representative numerical results, concerned with ideal as well as real antenna models, are reported and discussed to validate the proposed design strategy and point out the features of the deigned modular sparse arrays also in comparison with those obtained from conventional arrays with uniformly spaced elements.
Based on the technique of generalized likelihood ratio test, we address detection schemes for Doppler-shifted range-spread targets in Gaussian noise. First, a detection scheme is derived by solving the maximization associated with the estimation of unknown Doppler frequency with semi-definite programming. To lower the computational complexity of the detector, we then consider a simplification of the detector by adopting maximization over a relaxed space. Both of the proposed detectors are shown to have constant false alarm rate via numerical or theoretical analysis. The detection performance of the proposed detector based on the semi-definite programming is shown to be almost the same as that of the conventional detector designed for known Doppler frequency.
Millimeter wave (mmWave) technology can achieve high-speed communication due to the large available spectrum. Furthermore, the use of directional beams in mmWave system provides a natural defense against physical layer security attacks. In practice, however, the beams are imperfect due to mmWave hardware limitations such as the low-resolution of the phase shifters. These imperfections in the beam pattern introduce an energy leakage that can be exploited by an eavesdropper. To defend against such eavesdropping attacks, we propose a directional modulation-based defense technique where the transmitter applies random circulant shifts of a beamformer. We show that the use of random circulant shifts together with appropriate phase adjustment induces artificial phase noise (APN) in the directions different from that of the target receiver. Our method corrupts the phase at the eavesdropper without affecting the communication link of the target receiver. We also experimentally verify the APN induced due to circulant shifts, using channel measurements from a 2-bit mmWave phased array testbed. Using simulations, we study the performance of the proposed defense technique against a greedy eavesdropping strategy in a vehicle-to-infrastructure scenario. The proposed technique achieves better defense than the antenna subset modulation, without compromising on the communication link with the target receiver.
The design of isophoric phased arrays composed of two-sized square-shaped tiles that fully cover rectangular apertures is dealt with. The number and the positions of the tiles within the array aperture are optimized to fit desired specifications on the power pattern features. Toward this end, starting from the derivation of theoretical conditions for the complete tileability of the aperture, an ad hoc coding of the admissible arrangements, which implies a drastic reduction of the cardinality of the solution space, and their compact representation with a graph are exploited to profitably apply an effective optimizer based on an integer-coded genetic algorithm. A set of representative numerical examples, concerned with state-of-the-art benchmark problems, is reported and discussed to give some insights on the effectiveness of both the proposed tiled architectures and the synthesis strategy.
In this paper, four adaptive radar architectures for target detection in heterogeneous Gaussian environments are devised. The first architecture relies on a cyclic optimization exploiting the Maximum Likelihood Approach in the original data domain, whereas the second detector is a function of transformed data which are normalized with respect to their energy and with the unknown parameters estimated through an Expectation-Maximization-based alternate procedure. The remaining two architectures are obtained by suitably combining the estimation procedures and the detector structures previously devised. Performance analysis, conducted on both simulated and measured data, highlights that the architecture working in the transformed domain guarantees the constant false alarm rate property with respect to the interference power variations and a limited detection loss with respect to the other detectors, whose detection thresholds nevertheless are very sensitive to the interference power.