arXiv · 2611.02378
A Beam-Switched Sparse Circular Array for Passive Wi-Fi Sensing
Abstract
Wi-Fi sensing applications require unambiguous angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation over the full azimuth plane. Uniform circular arrays (UCAs) are shown to remove this ambiguity, but deploying the four RF chains typically available on commercial Wi-Fi chipsets into a sparse layout suffers from spatial undersampling. Such undersampling produces strong grating lobes. To overcome this hardware bottleneck, we first establish a generalized array manifold incorporating element radiation patterns, revealing the suitability and degradation mechanisms of directional UCAs. Then we propose an angularly staggered beam-switched UCA architecture that leverages the spatial complementarity. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively mitigates grating-lobe ambiguities without increasing the number of RF chains, significantly reducing AoA estimation outliers and improving omnidirectional tracking performance.
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Yang Chen, Riccardo Bersan, Daniele Piazza, Stefano Savazzi, Michele D'Amico. 2026-11-02. A Beam-Switched Sparse Circular Array for Passive Wi-Fi Sensing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02378
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