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Nil Garcia

Publications and source records attributed to Nil Garcia.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2022

Cramér-Rao Bound Analysis of Radars for Extended Vehicular Targets with Known and Unknown Shape

Due to their shorter operating range and large bandwidth, automotive radars can resolve many reflections from their targets of interest, mainly vehicles. This calls for the use of extended-target models in place of simpler and more widely-adopted point-like target models. However, despite some preliminary work, the fundamental connection between the radar's accuracy as a function of the target vehicle state (range, orientation, shape) and radar properties remains largely unknown for extended targets. In this work, we first devise a mathematically tractable analytical model for a vehicle with arbitrary shape, modeled as an extended target parameterized by the center position, the orientation (heading) and the perimeter contour. We show that the derived expressions of the backscatter signal are tractable and correctly capture the effects of the extended-vehicle shape. Analytical derivations of the exact and approximate hybrid Cramér-Rao bounds for the position, orientation and contour are provided, which reveal connections with the case of point-like target and uncover the main dependencies with the received energy, bandwidth, and array size. The theoretical investigation is performed on the two different cases of known and unknown vehicle shape. Insightful simulation results are finally presented to validate the theoretical findings, including an analysis of the diversity effect of multiple radars sensing the extended target.

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arXiv2020

RadChat: Spectrum Sharing for Automotive Radar Interference Mitigation

In the automotive sector, both radars and wireless communication are susceptible to interference. However, combining the radar and communication systems, i.e., radio frequency (RF) communications and sensing convergence, has the potential to mitigate interference in both systems. This article analyses the mutual interference of spectrally coexistent frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar and communication systems in terms of occurrence probability and impact, and introduces RadChat, a distributed networking protocol for mitigation of interference among FMCW based automotive radars, including self-interference, using radar communications. The results show that RadChat can significantly reduce radar mutual interference in single-hop vehicular networks in less than 80 ms.

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arXiv2019

MmWave Hybrid Array with More Users than RF Chains

In millimeter wave communications, hybrid analog-digital arrays consisting of only a few radiofrequency (RF) chains offer an attractive alternative to costly digital arrays. A limitation to hybrid arrays is that the number of streams that can be transmitted simultaneously cannot exceed the number of RF chains. We demonstrate that if the states of the analog components and the symbols passed to the RF chains are jointly optimized on a symbol-by-symbol (SbS) basis, it is possible to achieve the same degrees of freedom as a digital array with linear precoding, thus effectively enabling the transmission of a large number of streams. To this end, an algorithm for SbS hybrid precoding is proposed based on a variation of orthogonal matching pursuit, particularly suited to the structure of our problem, which makes it fast and precise.

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arXiv2019

5G mmWave Downlink Vehicular Positioning

5G new radio (NR) provides new opportunities for accurate positioning from a single reference station: large bandwidth combined with multiple antennas, at both the base station and user sides, allows for unparalleled angle and delay resolution. Nevertheless, positioning quality is affected by multipath and clock biases. We study, in terms of performance bounds and algorithms, the ability to localize a vehicle in the presence of multipath and unknown user clock bias. We find that when a sufficient number of paths is present, a vehicle can still be localized thanks to redundancy in the geometric constraints. Moreover, the 5G NR signals enable a vehicle to build up a map of the environment.

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arXiv2018

Radar Communication for Combating Mutual Interference of FMCW Radars

Commercial automotive radars used today are based on frequency modulated continuous wave signals due to the simple and robust detection method and good accuracy. However, the increase in both the number of radars deployed per vehicle and the number of such vehicles leads to mutual interference among automotive radars, and cutting short future plans for autonomous driving and safety. We propose and analyze a radar communication (RadCom) approach to reduce or eliminate this mutual interference while simultaneously offering communication functionality. Our RadCom approach frequency division multiplexes radar and communication, where communication is built on a decentralized carrier sense multiple access protocol and is used to adjust the timing of radar transmissions. Our simulation results indicate that radar interference can be significantly reduced, at no cost in radar accuracy.

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arXiv2018

Optimal Precoders for Tracking the AoD and AoA of a mm-Wave Path

In millimeter-wave channels, most of the received energy is carried by a few paths. Traditional precoders sweep the angle-of-departure (AoD) and angle-of-arrival (AoA) space with directional precoders to identify directions with largest power. Such precoders are heuristic and lead to sub-optimal AoD/AoA estimation. We derive optimal precoders, minimizing the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) of the AoD/AoA, assuming a fully digital architecture at the transmitter and spatial filtering of a single path. The precoders are found by solving a suitable convex optimization problem. We demonstrate that the accuracy can be improved by at least a factor of two over traditional precoders, and show that there is an optimal number of distinct precoders beyond which the CRB does not improve.

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arXiv2017

Implicit Cooperative Positioning in Vehicular Networks

Absolute positioning of vehicles is based on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) combined with on-board sensors and high-resolution maps. In Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS), the positioning performance can be augmented by means of vehicular networks that enable vehicles to share location-related information. This paper presents an Implicit Cooperative Positioning (ICP) algorithm that exploits the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) connectivity in an innovative manner, avoiding the use of explicit V2V measurements such as ranging. In the ICP approach, vehicles jointly localize non-cooperative physical features (such as people, traffic lights or inactive cars) in the surrounding areas, and use them as common noisy reference points to refine their location estimates. Information on sensed features are fused through V2V links by a consensus procedure, nested within a message passing algorithm, to enhance the vehicle localization accuracy. As positioning does not rely on explicit ranging information between vehicles, the proposed ICP method is amenable to implementation with off-the-shelf vehicular communication hardware. The localization algorithm is validated in different traffic scenarios, including a crossroad area with heterogeneous conditions in terms of feature density and V2V connectivity, as well as a real urban area by using Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) for traffic data generation. Performance results show that the proposed ICP method can significantly improve the vehicle location accuracy compared to the stand-alone GNSS, especially in harsh environments, such as in urban canyons, where the GNSS signal is highly degraded or denied.

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arXiv2016

Direct Localization for Massive MIMO

Large-scale MIMO systems are well known for their advantages in communications, but they also have the potential for providing very accurate localization thanks to their high angular resolution. A difficult problem arising indoors and outdoors is localizing users over multipath channels. Localization based on angle of arrival (AOA) generally involves a two-step procedure, where signals are first processed to obtain a user's AOA at different base stations, followed by triangulation to determine the user's position. In the presence of multipath, the performance of these methods is greatly degraded due to the inability to correctly detect and/or estimate the AOA of the line-of-sight (LOS) paths. To counter the limitations of this two-step procedure which is inherently sub-optimal, we propose a direct localization approach in which the position of a user is localized by jointly processing the observations obtained at distributed massive MIMO base stations. Our approach is based on a novel compressed sensing framework that exploits channel properties to distinguish LOS from non-LOS signal paths, and leads to improved performance results compared to previous existing methods.

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arXiv2015

High Precision TOA-based Direct Localization of Multiple Sources in Multipath

Localization of radio frequency sources over multipath channels is a difficult problem arising in applications such as outdoor or indoor gelocation. Common approaches that combine ad-hoc methods for multipath mitigation with indirect localization relying on intermediary parameters such as time-of-arrivals, time difference of arrivals or received signal strengths, provide limited performance. This work models the localization of known waveforms over unknown multipath channels in a sparse framework, and develops a direct approach in which multiple sources are localized jointly, directly from observations obtained at distributed sources. The proposed approach exploits channel properties that enable to distinguish line-of-sight (LOS) from non-LOS signal paths. Theoretical guarantees are established for correct recovery of the sources' locations by atomic norm minimization. A second-order cone-based algorithm is developed to produce the optimal atomic decomposition, and it is shown to produce high accuracy location estimates over complex scenes, in which sources are subject to diverse multipath conditions, including lack of LOS.

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arXiv2013

Resource Allocation in MIMO Radar With Multiple Targets for Non-Coherent Localization

In a MIMO radar network the multiple transmit elements may emit waveforms that differ on power and bandwidth. In this paper, we are asking, given that these two resources are limited, what is the optimal power, optimal bandwidth and optimal joint power and bandwidth allocation for best localization of multiple targets. The well known Crámer-Rao lower bound for target localization accuracy is used as a figure of merit and approximate solutions are found by minimizing a sequence of convex problems. Their quality is assessed through extensive numerical simulations and with the help of a lower-bound on the true solution. Simulations results reveal that bandwidth allocation policies have a definitely stronger impact on performance than power.

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