Impulse radio ultra-wide-band through wall imaging radar based on multiple-input multiple-output antenna arrays

Abstract

An Impulse Radio Ultra-Wide-Band (IR-UWB) Through Wall Imaging Radar (TWIR) employing linear MIMO antenna array, which is designed based on the effective array concept, is discussed in this study. An effective method to compute the signal travel time is also proposed. A major challenge of the IR-UWB TWIR is the cross-range resolution, which requires an antenna array with not only large operational bandwidth, but also certain aperture size. The real aperture array speeds up the data acquisition compared with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), while it requires large number of elements and multiple channels in transceivers. To overcome this problem, Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) array is applied in the TWIR system. Effective array concept is used as the basis to design the MIMO array topology. Even though this concept is derived under narrow band far field condition firstly, it is demonstrated that it can be applied to the UWB near field TWIR. Performance of this MIMO array is investigated by TWIR image results. Numerical results showed that, the proposed MIMO array achieves the same resolution, lower side lobe level and lower artifacts, with much fewer antenna elements, as compared to the effective Single-Input and Multiple-Output (SIMO) array. © 2010 Asian Network for Scientific Information.