A 24 GHz Phased-Array Doppler Radar Sensor and Transceiver Front-End for Smart Streetlights

Recently, European Union advocates the smart Solid-State Lighting (SSL). The key factors are a smart-control scheme and an interaction with other networks, such as communication networks and traffic monitoring sensor networks. Public lighting represents a significant share of city total electricity costs, accounting for up to 60% of the budget. The adoption and deployment of new technologies, such as SSL that is based on Light-Emitting Diodes (LED), offer great opportunities to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. When combined with smart light management systems, SSL can save up the electricity used for lighting and significantly reduce energy and maintenance costs compared to current lighting installations. Moreover, streetlights are the infrastructures erecting beside or in the middle of the streets, so they seem to be the ideal observers of the traffic situations. Even though, other functional sensors, e.g., for measuring temperatures, CO2 and even particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5), could be integrated in the smart-streetlights. Nowadays there are no sensors embedded in commercial available streetlights, except for the infrared motion sensor used only for pedestrian detection since their range is limited to about 10 meters, as well as there are limited networking capabilities, both in data-rate and functionalities, e.g. it is possible the dimming of only the entire file of streetlights. Hence, the idea to develop aWireless Sensor Front-End (WSFE), which is capable of working as motion sensor, namely a Doppler radar sensor, to monitor the road traffic as well as transceiver to communicate with the other network nodes. Such kind of WSFE could enable many streetlights futures, for example the lighting can be adapted to the traffic conditions and the presence of pedestrians on the sideways. Meanwhile, the communication function can build up a wireless network that can be used to manage the streetlight infrastructure and to collect information on traffic conditions, sensor reading, network status and so on. This thesis proposes a 24GHz 4-channel Phased-Array (Ph-A) front-end for smart-streetlight applications. The design exploits a 90nm Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology to benefit of the low-cost offered by CMOS technology. The architecture of the selected front-end allows the implementation of transceivers as well as Doppler radar sensors. Furthermore, the Ph-A technology is applied to the Doppler radar sensor in order to realizemulti-lane road scanning and pedestrian detection. The intercommunication between streetlights is based on a time-sharing mechanism and uses the same FE reconfigured as transceiver.[...]