A High-Speed Multi-Purpose Software Defined Radar for Near-Field Applications

Software Defined Radar (SDRadar) is a unique radar system, where most of its processing, like filtering, correlation, signal generation etc. is performed by software. This means SDRadar can be flexibly deployed for different purposes and with a relative short development process. In this paper, we present a generic SDRadar system that can operate in different setups for near-field monitoring applications. Practical solutions for traditional limitations in SDRadar and high sampling rates are introduced, and its performance is demonstrated using a commercial universal software radio peripheral (USRP) device with four synchronized receiving channels and a maximum sampling rate of 100MHz. Additionally, a GPU accelerator has been implemented to deal with the high sampling rate. Three different setups have been tested to demonstrate the feasibility of the propose SDRadar system with distributed nodes, vertically positioned nodes and a miniature scenario. Recorded Doppler signatures have shown the proposed SDRadar can effectively capture the body and hand gestures. Such results can be used in a range of applications such as eHealth, human-machine interaction and indoor tracking.