Radio Positioning With EM Processing of the Spherical Wavefront

Next 5G and beyond applications have attracted a tremendous interest towards systems using antenna arrays with an extremely large number of antennas where the technology conceived for communication might also be exploited for high-accuracy positioning applications. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to infer the position of a single antenna transmitter using a single asynchronous receiving node by retrieving information from the incident spherical wavefront. To this end, we consider the adoption of a suitable mix of processing at electromagnetic (EM) and signal levels, as a lower complexity alternative to classical massive array systems where the processing is done entirely at signal level. Thus, we first introduce a dedicated general model for different EM processing architectures, entailing the use or not of a lens that can have either a reconfigurable or a fixed phase profile, and successively we investigate their attainable positioning performance. The effect of the interference is also investigated to evaluate the robustness of the considered system to the presence of multiple simultaneous transmitting sources. Results, obtained for different apertures of the exploited lens/array, confirm the possibility to achieve interesting positioning performance using a single antenna array with a limited aperture.