Dynamic Indoor mmWave MIMO Radar Simulation: An Image Rendering-Based Approach

Radar simulation offers the potential to generate data cubes with effectiveness and accuracy. However, the radar simulator considering both dense multipaths of indoor environment and dynamic motions is rare. This article develops a versatile channel simulator that can generate frequency modulation continuous wave (FMCW) waveform multiple inputs and multiple outputs (MIMO) signals of indoor scenarios. In the proposed simulation framework, the open-source tool called Blender is utilized to model dynamic scenarios and render animations. Each frame of the animation is rendered into a picture with a defined number of pixels by the ray tracing (RT) engine embedded in Blender. Then, the distance, strength, angle of arrival (AoA), and motion speed of each pixel are calculated based on the traced rays. The sampled beat signal models of the commonly used orthogonal multiplexing MIMO modes are derived in terms of the Blender outputs. A virtual array generation method is utilized to improve the simulation time efficiency. To eliminate the velocity noise, a pixel filtering method is also introduced. For validation, the measurements of the time-division multiplexing (TDM) FMCW MIMO sensor in both anechoic chamber and corridor scenario at the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band are compared with the simulation using range, angle, Doppler, and micro-Doppler results. The comparisons show the merits and validation of the proposed simulation method.