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Modern-day radar is used extensively in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, air traffic control, and maritime operations. The commonality between the aforementioned examples is the underlying tracking filter used to process ambiguous detections and track multiple targets. In this paper, we present a Software-Defined Radio-based radar testbed that leverages controllable and repeatable large-scale wireless channel emulation to evaluate diverse radar applications experimentally without the complexity and expense of field testing. Through over-the-air (OTA) and emulated evaluation, we demonstrate the capa-bilities of this testbed to perform multiple-target tracking (MTT) via Joint Probabilistic Data Association (JPDA) filtering. This testbed features the use of flexible sub-6 GHz or mmWave operation, electromagnetic ray tracing for site-specific emulation, and software reconfigurable radar waveforms and processing. Although the testbed is designed generalizable, for this paper we demonstrate its capabilities using an advanced driver-assistance system radar application. 

We present a pattern reconfigurable conformal mmWave antenna at 28 GHz for 5G applications. Using a T-junction power divider and PIN diodes, eight 2×2 sub-arrays of microstrip patches are configured to radiate independently creating separate states capable of 360° of discrete coverage. 

Traditional approaches to experimental characterization of wireless communication systems typically involves highly specialized and small-scale experiments to examine narrow aspects of each of these applications. We present the Grid SDR testbed, a unified experimental framework to rapidly prototype and evaluate these diverse systems using: (i) field measurements to evaluate real time transceiver and channel-specific effects and (ii) network emulation to evaluate systems at a large scale with controllable and repeatable channels. We present the hardware and software architecture for our testbed, and describe how it being used for research and education. Specifically, we show experimental network layer metrics in different application domains, and discuss future opportunities using this unique experimental capability. 

Indoor blockage in a millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless communication link introduces significant signal attenuation. Solving the indoor blockage problem is critical to effectively using the unlicensed 60 GHz band spectrum. This work used various V-band horn antennas to collect signal measurements in an indoor lab environment. As an object blocks the Tx- Rx line of sight (LOS) path, the signal fades deeply. Experimental results showed that switching to a wider beam with lower gain has the potential to partially restore or maintain a communicating link. Effective beam switching and coordinated beam steering can shorten deep fades which is crucial for mm Wave communication systems that are very sensitive to the spatial characteristics of the environment. The experimental results in this paper thus motivate the design of future indoor mm Wave antennas capable of beam switching and facilitate fast beam search. 

This paper presents a low-cost, beam-steerable 4 × 10 antenna array system operating at 60 GHz. The proposed antenna system is fed by a 4 × 10 Butler Matrix network designed using microstrip line (ML) structure. Chebyshev tapered microstrip antenna arrays with 10 series-fed elements are connected to four output ports of the feed network. Four steerable beams with maximum 16.5 dBi system gain and 1GHz bandwidth(BW) satisfy the requirements of millimeter wave propagation study and handset application for 5G communication.