High-performance Passive Eigen-model-based Detectors of Single Emitter Using Massive MIMO Receivers

Abstract: For a passive direction of arrival (DoA) measurement system using massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO), it is mandatory to infer whether the emitter exists or not before performing DOA estimation operation. Inspired by the detection idea from radio detection and ranging (radar), three high-performance detectors are proposed to infer the existence of single passive emitter from the eigen-space of sample covariance matrix of receive signal vector. The test statistic (TS) of the first method is defined as the ratio of maximum eigen-value (Max-EV) to minimum eigen-value (R-MaxEV-MinEV) while that of the second one is defined as the ratio of Max-EV to noise variance (R-MaxEV-NV). The TS of the third method is the mean of maximum eigen-value (EV) and minimum EV(M-MaxEV-MinEV). Their closed-form expressions are presented and the corresponding detection performance is given. Simulation results show that the proposed M-MaxEV-MinEV and R-MaxEV-NV methods can approximately achieve the same detection performance that is better than the traditional generalized likelihood ratio test method with false alarm probability being less than 0.3.