Multibeam Phased Arrays with Spherical Gold Spatio-temporal Coding for Fading-Resilient and Delay Robust Beam Isolations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a spherical Gold coding scheme for multibeam arrays that significantly improves inter-beam isolation and robustness against fading and synchronization errors in integrated sensing and communication systems.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel spherical Gold spatio-temporal coding method that enhances multibeam isolation without increasing RF complexity, outperforming traditional temporal-only codes.

Findings

Achieves at least 15 dB inter-beam rejection under fading and timing errors.

Maintains less than 2.5 dB variation in sidelobe level.

Outperforms temporal-only CDMA with about 8 dB higher sidelobe levels.

Abstract

Future integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems require simultaneous multibeam operation with low-latency hardware and robust isolation under synchronization error and fading. Conventional code-division multiplexing using Walsh-Hadamard codes is extremely time-sensitive. This paper demonstrates that conventional temporal-only coded multibeam arrays suffer from inter-beam sidelobe level (SLL) collapse to within a few dB of the main lobe, with variations exceeding 10-20 dB over delay. By embedding moderate-length Gold sequences into a spherical spatial codebook, the proposed Spherical-Gold scheme leverages both temporal and spatial correlation bounds, achieving effective inter-beam isolation without increasing RF complexity. Measurement results and verifications are performed using an Analog Devices ADAR3002 Ka-band 256-element receiver with four simultaneous beams. The proposed scheme demonstrates at least 15 dB rejection with less than 2.5 dB variation in SLL under time error and fading, whereas temporal-only CDMA degrades to approximately -5 to -7 dB SLL with nearly 8 dB variation under time delay.