BiLiMO: Bit-Limited MIMO Radar via Task-Based Quantization

TL;DR

This paper introduces BiLiMO, a low-cost MIMO radar system that uses low-resolution ADCs and task-based quantization to accurately detect targets, significantly reducing power and cost while maintaining high performance.

Contribution

It proposes a novel hybrid analog-digital receiver design with task-based quantization for low-resolution MIMO radar, enabling effective target detection with minimal bit resolution.

Findings

Achieves near-unlimited resolution radar performance with only 1-bit ADCs.

Outperforms digital-only low-bit MIMO radar systems.

Demonstrates effective target recovery with minimal quantization.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in reduced cost radar systems operating with low power. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar technology is known to achieve high performance sensing by probing with multiple orthogonal waveforms. However, implementing a low cost low power MIMO radar is challenging. One of the reasons for this difficulty stems from the increased cost and power consumption required by analog-to-digital convertors (ADCs) in acquiring the multiple waveforms at the radar receiver. In this work we study reduced cost MIMO radar receivers restricted to operate with low resolution ADCs. We design bit-limited MIMO radar (BiLiMO) receivers which are capable of accurately recovering their targets while operating under strict resolution constraints. This is achieved by applying an additional analog filter to the acquired waveforms, and designing the overall hybrid analog-digital system to facilitate target identification using task-based quantization methods. In particular, we exploit the fact that the target parameters can be recovered from a compressed representation of the received waveforms. We thus tune the acquisition system to recover this representation with minimal distortion, from which the targets can be extracted in digital, and characterize the achievable error in identifying the targets. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed BiLiMO receiver operating with a bit budget of one bit per sample achieves target recovery performance which approaches that of costly MIMO radars operating with unlimited resolution ADCs, while substantially outperforming MIMO receivers operating only in the digital domain under the same bit limitations.