A Novel Doppler-based Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Scheme
Patrick Neesen, Michael Meuleners, Christoph Degen · 2018
Direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation is an essential means for localization issues in various applications. DoA estimation can be extended, for example, to source triangulation. Many approaches in this field, such as beamforming, exploit the knowledge of all signal amplitudes and phases of an antenna array. That is, as many receivers and analog-to-digital converters as antenna elements are required, followed by array signal processing. In contrast to that, Doppler-based DoA estimation typically involves switching between circularly arranged antenna elements and further processing of the resulting signal stream. In this paper, a novel Doppler-based DoA scheme is presented which makes use of the same hardware set-up as classical beamforming approaches on the one hand. On the other hand, very simple signal processing in analogy to Doppler direction finding is applied. This results in the advantage of having a common hardware that now can be used for a wider range of DoA algorithms. Also, the proposed scheme as well as the well-known MUSIC algorithm have been implemented using software-defined-radio (SDR) modules. Measurement results for validation and comparison are presented in this paper.