Experimental Validation of Superresolution Delay Estimation Algorithm using a 26 GHz Radar Setup

Abstract

Estimating the delay of signals is an important aspect in radar systems. Simple methods relying on cross-correlation (CCR) only have limited estimation accuracy by the inverse of the probing signal bandwidth. In this paper, we experimentally validate a superresolution path delay estimation (SPDE) method, which provides better accuracy than the CCR-based methods. For this purpose, we employ a radar setup using two collocated 26 GHz radio front-ends for transmission and reception. In a particular scenario, we consider a channel with two rays corresponding to cross talk and a target of interest. We show that the estimated delays using SPDE match the target distance with high accuracy using narrower bandwidth where CCR fails. Since the employed front-ends is primarily developed for communication, our setup is a showcase of reusing the hardware for joint radio communications and sensing (JCAS).