Multiple-path Direction-of-Arrival estimation for cognitive radio sensing
Prokopios Panagiotou, A. Polydoros, Phunsak Thiennviboon · 2010
The estimation of the position of an emitting source is an important aspect of emerging cognitive radio systems. We readdress the known problem of estimating the Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) of an emitting source via passive radio means, namely an antenna array. The challenges in the considered scenarios are (a) time-varying, terrestrial multipath propagation with medium-to-low SNR and (b) very short capture records (single-packet processing). We present a two-stage estimation procedure: first an overall channel estimation stage followed by a DOA extraction method suitable to both blind (no training data employed) as well as training-assisted cases. The performance results presented demonstrate that the DOA estimation performance of this procedure is close to the theoretical Cramer-Rao Lower Bound for a large variety of challenging propagation scenarios.