Improving the shapes of planar antenna arrays to improve accuracy of radar with super-resolution

Abstract

A promising way to increase the bandwidth and noise immunity of modern wireless information transmission systems is the use of antenna arrays equipped with a digital signal processing unit, which include MIMO systems (Multiple Input Multiple Output), as well as adaptive (smart) antennas. The main advantage of this approach is the antenna’s spacing, which makes it possible to assess the angular coordinates of radio signals with further developing a radiation pattern. Gaps in studying the influence of the lattice geometry together with various kinds of antenna elements are known to be one of the factors of inaccuracy of such systems. The work is aimed at obtaining the shape of a planar antenna array with a higher direction finding accuracy. There is described an algorithm for calculating such an arrangement of antenna elements of flat antenna arrays, in which the standard deviation of the estimates of the angular coordinates of one and two radio signal sources is reduced. The proposed approach is based on the analysis of the influence of antenna location on the variance of estimates described by the lower boundary of Kramer-Rao. This value shows the influence of the location of antenna elements on the accuracy of estimating the direction of arrival of a joint assessment with two signal sources. It has been shown that the accuracy of the direction-of-arrival non-joint estimation is determined as the sum of squared differences between all coordinates of omnidirectional elements along the X- and Y-axis if one signal arrives. If two signals arrive, the accuracy of the direction-of-arrival joint estimation depends on the sum of cosines having the argument with the difference between sensor coordinates and signals radius-vectors. The optimal location of the antenna elements using the obtained expressions can be calculated very easily to reduce the direction-finding errors near particular sectors. In order to confirm the proposed method, there were studied the antenna arrays built after minimizing the boundary of Kramer-Rao, where the target functions are the new expressions. It is found out that the new shapes of antenna arrays based on the analytical expressions have better direction-of-arrival accuracy in comparison with the circular ones.