Uniform rectangular time reversal arrays: Joint azimuth and elevation estimation

Abstract

The paper proposes a time reversal based uniform rectangular array (TR/URA) system for joint estimation of azimuth and elevation of a stationary target. For target localization in a rich scattering environment, conventional radars fail due to interference from multipath signal reflections. The TR/URA system uses multipath to its advantage by utilizing the energy constructively from all paths. To quantify its performance, we derive the Cramér-Rao lower bounds (CRLB) for both the conventional and TR/URA systems. In both our analytical comparisons based on the CRLBs and Monte Carlo simulations, the TR/URA system outperforms its conventional counterpart by a factor of up to 10dB in SNRs ranging from -25dB to 0dB.