Adaptive Detection and Localization Exploiting the IEEE 802.11ad Standard

In this work, we exploit the sector level sweep of the IEEE 802.11ad communication standard to implement an opportunistic radar at mmWaves and derive an adaptive procedure for detecting multiple echoes and estimating their parameters (namely, amplitude, delay, and Doppler shift). The proposed detector/estimator extracts the prospective echoes one-by-one from the received signal, after removing the interference caused by the previously detected (stronger) reverberations from the environment. Examples are provided to assess the system performance, also in comparison with other detectors/estimators and the Cramér-Rao bounds on the localization accuracy. Results indicate that the proposed method is robust against the interference induced by the imperfect ambiguity function and can achieve a delay resolution approximately equal to the inverse of the signal bandwidth, corresponding to a range offset of about 17 cm. Instead, the Doppler resolution is inherently limited by the short duration of the data packet and, in the most favorable case, is approximately 3.26 KHz, corresponding to a relative radial velocity off-set of about 8.16 m/s for a wavelength of 5 mm.