The Random Frequency Diverse Array: A New Antenna Structure for Uncoupled Direction-Range Indication in Active Sensing

Yimin Liu, Hang Ruan, Lei Wang, Arye Nehorai

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

217 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new type of array antenna, termed the random frequency diverse array (RFDA), for an uncoupled indication of target direction and range with low system complexity. In RFDA, each array element has a narrow bandwidth and a randomly assigned carrier frequency. The beampattern of the array is shown to be stochastic but thumbtack-like, and its stochastic characteristics, such as the mean, variance, and asymptotic distribution are derived analytically. Based on these two features, we propose two kinds of algorithms for signal processing. One is matched filtering, due to the beampattern's good characteristics. The other is compressive sensing, because the new approach can be regarded as a sparse and random sampling of target information in the spatial-frequency domain. Fundamental limits, such as the Cramér-Rao bound and the observing matrix's mutual coherence, are provided as performance guarantees of the new array structure. The features and performances of RFDA are verified with numerical results.

Original languageEnglish
Article number7740037
Pages (from-to)295-308
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing
Volume11
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2017

Keywords

  • Array antenna
  • Cramér-Rao bound
  • compressive sensing
  • frequency diverse

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