Antenna Placement for Monostatic Near-Field Wireless Sensing

Abstract

The emergence of movable antenna technology enables flexible antenna placement, allowing transceiver antennas to more effectively exploit spatial degrees of freedom. In this paper, we investigate a monostatic near-field sensing system, aiming to minimize the worst-case squared position error bound (SPEB) over the entire near-field region by jointly optimizing the transmit and receive antenna placements, along with the transmit power allocation. Toward this end, we first derive the closed-form expression of SPEB by calculating the Cram\'er-Rao bound (CRB) for estimating the target's angle and distance. It is shown that the derived SPEB is governed by the power-weighted moments of the transmit antenna locations and the moments of the receive antenna locations, motivating the development of a moment-based optimization algorithm. Functional analysis of the SPEB's moment structure proves that the optimal antenna distributions can be realized by a centro-symmetric structure, and shows that the worst-case target is located at the array broadside on the Rayleigh boundary. Moreover, by leveraging moment-based analysis and the Richter-Tchakaloff theorem, we derive closed-form antenna distributions with three points supported at the aperture center and two edges. Specifically, the optimal transmit antenna distribution can be exactly realized by activating only three transmit antennas while the optimal receive antenna distribution consists of three clusters. Numerical results show that the proposed closed-form design significantly outperforms conventional antenna placements and power allocation benchmark schemes.