A Beam-Switched Sparse Circular Array for Passive Wi-Fi Sensing

Abstract

Wi-Fi sensing applications require unambiguous angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation over the full azimuth plane. Uniform circular arrays (UCAs) are shown to remove this ambiguity, but deploying the four RF chains typically available on commercial Wi-Fi chipsets into a sparse layout suffers from spatial undersampling. Such undersampling produces strong grating lobes. To overcome this hardware bottleneck, we first establish a generalized array manifold incorporating element radiation patterns, revealing the suitability and degradation mechanisms of directional UCAs. Then we propose an angularly staggered beam-switched UCA architecture that leverages the spatial complementarity. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively mitigates grating-lobe ambiguities without increasing the number of RF chains, significantly reducing AoA estimation outliers and improving omnidirectional tracking performance.