Direction of Arrival Estimation with Uniform Planar Array

Abstract

Analog/digital/hybrid beamformer/receiver designs for mmWave communication have attracted great research attentions including directional of arrival (DOA) estimation. Traditional investigation of smart antennas for wireless communications has primarily focused on uniform linear array (ULA) antennas and there are little attention and literature on other smart antennas array topologies. Those DOA estimation algorithms designed for ULA (with received signal as a vector) can not immediately be applied for uniform planar array (UPA) structure (with received signal as a matrix). In this work, start with UPA DOA estimation system model, we process the received matrix through a simple vectorization process to construct a received vector. With theoretical proof of the vectorization process equivalence, conventional DOA estimation based on ULA can easily be applied to UPA structure. We apply several DOA estimation algorithms to UPA for one DOA arriving signal or multiple DOA arriving signals, with both perfect known autocorrelation matrix and estimated autocorrelation matrix through sample averaging, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DOA estimation process for UPA.