Distributed Phased-Array Radars Exploiting Collaborative Beamforming and Diversity Techniques for Remote Sensing Applications

Abstract

The analysis of phased-arrays exploiting the paradigm of collaborative beamforming together with excitation and position diversity is illustrated in this work. Excitation diversity is based on a thinned arrays framework, while position diversity is implemented in terms of binned arrays paradigm. The proposed approach can fall under collaborative beamforming related to wireless sensor networks. After introducing the description of the above arrays and the related mathematical model, stochastic analysis is carried out to highlight the main characteristics, by modeling the excitation coefficients and the element positions in terms of random variables. In particular, adequately exploiting the diversity framework, it is shown the possibility to flexibly control the pattern behaviour. The proposed analysis can be useful to characterize the performance of distributed phased-array radars exploiting collaborative beamforming and diversity techniques in drone applications for remote sensing.