Passive UWB beamforming: A N to M compression study

Recent works have demonstrated the feasibility of microwave imaging using compressive techniques, exempting the use the of active delay lines, phase shifters, or moving parts to achieve beamforming. With this method, waves are coded in a passive way by a compressive device to reduce the complexity of the transmitter and/or receiver chains of the telecommunication and radar systems requiring beamsteering. Since this technique is based on frequency diversity, the reduction of the compressive device´s volume imposes a diminution of the amount of driven antennas. In this article, the improvement brought by simultaneous excitations of the compressive device is presented. Adapting a new mathematical formulation, it is shown that M inputs can send independent waveforms allowing the beamsteering of an N-elements antenna array, while maintaining N > M.