WiFi-based PCL for monitoring private airfields

In this article, the potential exploitation of WiFi-based PCL systems is investigated with reference to a real-world civil application in which these sensors are expected to nicely complement the existing technologies adopted for monitoring purposes, especially when operating against noncooperative targets. In particular, we consider the monitoring application of small private airstrips or airfields. With this terminology, we refer to open areas designated for the takeoff and landing of small aircrafts that, unlike an airport, have generally short and possibly unpaved runways (e.g., grass, dirt, sand, or gravel surfaces) and do not necessarily have terminals. More important, such areas usually are devoid of conventional technologies, equipment, or procedures adopted to guarantee safety and security in large aerodromes.There exist a huge number of small, privately owned, and unlicensed airfields around the world. Private aircraft owners mainly use these “airports” for recreational, single-person, or private flights for small groups and training flight purposes. In addition, residential airparks have proliferated in recent years, especially inthe United States, Canada, and South Africa. A residential airpark, or “fly-in community,” features common airstrips where homes with attached hangars allow owners to taxi from their hangar to a shared runway. In many cases, roads are dual use for both cars and planes.In such scenarios, the possibility to employ low-cost, compact, nonintrusive, and nontransmitting sensors as a way to improve safety and security with limited impact on the airstrips' users would be of great potential interest. To this purpose, WiFi-based passive radar sensors appear to be good candidates [23]. Therefore, we investigate their application against typical operative conditions experienced in the scenarios described earlier. The aim is to assess the capability to detect, localize, and track authorized and unauthorized targets that can be occupying the runway and the surrounding areas

Short-range passive radar for small private airports surveillance

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a passive radar for enhancing the security level in small airports and private runways. Specifically WiFi transmissions are parasitically exploited to perform detection and localization of non-cooperative targets that can be occupying the runway and the surrounding areas. Targets of interest include light/ultralight aircrafts, vehicles, people and even animals that may intrude onto the runways either intentionally or accidentally. The experimental results obtained by means of an experimental setup developed at SAPIENZA University of Rome prove the successful applicability of the proposed approach for small airports surveillance. © 2016 EuMA

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexed Waveform Effects on Passive Bistatic Radar

Communication waveforms act as signals of opportunity for passive radars. However, these signals of opportunity suffer from range-Doppler processing losses due to their high range sidelobes and pulse-diverse waveform aspects. Signals such as the long term evolution (LTE) encode information within the phase and amplitude of the waveform. This research explores aspects of the LTE, such as the encoding scheme and bandwidth modes on passive bistatic Doppler radar. Signal space-time adaptive processing (STAP) performance is evaluated and parameters are compared with the signal to interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) metric

Cooperative Passive Coherent Location: A Promising 5G Service to Support Road Safety

5G promises many new vertical service areas beyond simple communication and data transfer. We propose CPCL (cooperative passive coherent location), a distributed MIMO radar service, which can be offered by mobile radio network operators as a service for public user groups. CPCL comes as an inherent part of the radio network and takes advantage of the most important key features proposed for 5G. It extends the well-known idea of passive radar (also known as passive coherent location, PCL) by introducing cooperative principles. These range from cooperative, synchronous radio signaling, and MAC up to radar data fusion on sensor and scenario levels. By using software-defined radio and network paradigms, as well as real-time mobile edge computing facilities intended for 5G, CPCL promises to become a ubiquitous radar service which may be adaptive, reconfigurable, and perhaps cognitive. As CPCL makes double use of radio resources (both in terms of frequency bands and hardware), it can be considered a green technology. Although we introduce the CPCL idea from the viewpoint of vehicle-to-vehicle/infrastructure (V2X) communication, it can definitely also be applied to many other applications in industry, transport, logistics, and for safety and security applications

Hardware Development and Error Characterisation for the AFIT RAIL SAR System

This research is focussed on updating the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) Radar Instrumentation Lab (RAIL) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) experimental system. Firstly, this research assesses current hardware limitations and updates the system configuration and methodology to enable collections from a receiver in motion. Secondly, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signals are used to form (SAR) images in multiple experimental and simulation configurations. This research analyses, characterises and attempts compensation of relevant SAR image error sources, such as Doppler shift or motion measurement errors (MMEs). Error characterisation is conducted using theoretical, simulated and experimental methods. Final experimental results are presented to verify performance of the updated SAR collection system and show improvements to the final product through an updated methodology and various signal processing techniques

On the Use of Reciprocal Filter against WiFi Packets for Passive Radar

This paper aims at a critical review of the signal processing scheme used in WiFi-based passive radar in order to limit its complexity and enhance its suitability for short range civilian applications. To this purpose the exploitation of a reciprocal filtering strategy is investigated as an alternative to conventional matched filtering at the range compression stage. Along with the well-known advantage of a remarkable sidelobes control capability for the resulting range-Doppler response, the use of a reciprocal filter is shown to provide additional benefits for the specific sensor subject of this study. Specifically, it allows to streamline the disturbance cancellation stage and to implement a unified signal processing architecture which is capable to handle the different modulation schemes typically adopted in WiFi transmissions. Appropriate adjustments are also proposed to the theoretical reciprocal filter in order to cope with the inherent loss in term of signal-to-noise power ratio. The effectiveness of the revised signal processing scheme encompassing the reciprocal filtering strategy is proved against both simulated and experimental datasets

Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or "promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality. Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun. The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO, Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital Signal Processin