High Accuracy Tracking of Targets Using Massive MIMO

Abstract

While high accuracy tracking of targets has been extensively explored because of its wide applications, many exiting methods degenerate in the presence of multipath distortions. This paper proposes an accurate and novel multipath-resilient system to track the targets by leveraging the large number of antennas in massive MIMO systems. We first prove that statistical autocorrelation of the received energy physically shows a sinc-like distribution around the receiver in far-field scenario. Based on such an observation, a novel method is developed to estimate the moving speed of the target with respect to a single base station. The absolute moving speed and direction are further estimated by using the geometrical relationships among multiple base stations and thus we can track the target by dead-reckoning using the consecutive moving speed and moving direction estimations. Numerical simulations show that the proposed system can achieve decimeter-lever accuracy for tracking in various environments, which outperforms the existing methods.