Concentric circular shaped ESPAR antennas for full azimuth Directions of Arrival estimation

Abstract

This paper proposes a new Uniform Concentric Circular (UCCA) shaped Electronically Steerable Parasitic Array Radiator (ESPAR) antennas for Directions of Arrival (DoAs) estimation problem. The well known ESPRIT algorithm is adapted to this special shape of UCCA and we demonstrate the resulting algorithm yields to a better DoAs estimation accuracy and solves the failure of estimation problem associated with the signals' DoAs in some particular sectors: notably when they range [0°-30°] and [160°-180°]. This approach has shown interesting performances for the entire half azimuth plane without any extra overhead computations. The Cramer Rao Bound on the variance of DoAs estimated by the proposed ESPAR antennas shape is analysed. The simulations results confirm that this new shape of UCCA not only provides superior high resolution localisation capabilities but also considerably reduces both calculation cost and processing time of the DoAs estimator compared with previous works based on the Uniform Hexagonal Array shape (UHA).