Unified Error Analysis of Multi-site Radar via Equivalent Angular Resolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified framework for multi-site radar sensing based on equivalent angular resolution, enabling optimized node placement and improved indoor localization accuracy over traditional MIMO systems.

Contribution

It establishes a novel metric for comparing multi-site and monostatic MIMO radars and provides a design methodology for virtual aperture synthesis to enhance localization.

Findings

Multi-site SISO configuration reduces maximum localization error from 0.58 m to 0.20 m.

The proposed framework enables effective virtual aperture design.

Experiments validate the superiority of multi-site SISO over monostatic MIMO.

Abstract

High-precision indoor sensing using monostatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar typically relies on increasing the physical aperture size of antennas, leading to high hardware complexity and cost. To overcome this bottleneck, this paper establishes a unified framework for multi-site radar sensing based on equivalent angular resolution, together with a design methodology that uses this metric to optimize distributed Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) configurations. By mapping spatial diversity into the angular domain, the proposed metric enables a direct and physically interpretable comparison with monostatic MIMO beamwidth. The associated methodology provides a principled way to select node placement and geometry to synthesize an effective virtual aperture that suppresses angular glint and multipath. Experiments with commercial 60-GHz radars in cluttered indoor environments validate the superiority of the multi-site SISO configuration over monostatic MIMO, demonstrating a reduction in maximum localization error from 0.58 m to 0.20 m and mean error from 0.35 m to 0.12 m.