Estimation and Minimization of the Cramer-Rao lower bound for radio direction-finding on the azimuth and elevation of planar antenna arrays

Abstract

In this paper an approach of obtaining optimal planar antenna arrays consisting of omnidirectional sensors is proposed. The novelty of the proposed approach is to apply an exact expression of the Cramer-Rao lower bound for an arbitrary planar antenna array consisting of a number of omnidirectional elements which has been presented in the further chapters of the paper. The obtained formula describes the influence of antenna elements locations on the direction-of-arrival estimation accuracy. It has been shown that the direction-of-arrival accuracy via planar antenna arrays is determined as the sum of squares of differences between all omnidirectional elements coordinates along x- and y-axis. Thus knowing an expected area or sector of signal source it is very easy to calculate optimal arrangement of antenna elements in order to reduce direction-finding errors, because obtained by that way positions gives the best match according to the maximum likelihood criterion. It is worth nothing that such antenna arrays are useful in the way that they allow estimating the coordinates of radio emission sources in the three-dimensional coordinate space, i.e. in azimuth and elevation. In order to confirm the proposed methodology optimal antenna arrays constructed after minimization of the new formulas are researched. It is found out that the new shapes of antenna arrays based on the analytical expressions have better direction-of-arrival accuracy in comparison with the circular ones.