A Demo of Radar Sensing Aided Rotatable Antenna for Wireless Communication System
Qi Dai, Beixiong Zheng, Qiyao Wang, Xue Xiong, Xiaodan Shao, Lipeng Zhu, Rui Zhang
TL;DR
The paper tackles fixed-antenna limitations in next-generation wireless networks by introducing a radar-sensing-aided rotatable antenna (RA) that dynamically steers the antenna boresight. It presents a practical prototype that integrates a laser radar TOF-based RX localization, AoA extraction, and PID-controlled RA alignment, implemented with USRP-based transmit and receive chains. Experimental results at 5.8 GHz show the RA achieves higher received power and more robust SNR than a fixed antenna when the RX location changes, demonstrated with 16-QAM. The findings indicate that radar-assisted RA can enhance coverage and reliability with lower hardware cost, supporting its viability for 6G and beyond.
Abstract
Rotatable antenna (RA) represents a novel antenna architecture that enhances wireless communication system performance by independently or collectively adjusting each antenna's boresight/orientation. In this demonstration, we develop a prototype of radar sensing-aided rotatable antenna that integrates radar sensing with dynamic antenna orientation to enhance wireless communication performance while maintaining low hardware costs. The proposed prototype consists of a transmitter (TX) module and a receiver (RX) module, both of which employ universal software radio peripherals (USRPs) for transmitting and receiving signals. Specifically, the TX utilizes a laser radar to detect the RX's location and conveys the angle of arrival (AoA) information to its antenna servo, which enables the RA to align its boresight direction with the identified RX. Experimental results examine the effectiveness of the proposed prototype and indicate that the RA significantly outperforms the traditional fixed-antenna system in terms of increasing received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).