Accurate 2-D AOA Estimation and Ambiguity Resolution for a Single Source under Fixed Uniform Circular Arrays

Abstract EN

This paper presents an analytic algorithm for accurate two-dimensional (2-D) angle of arrival (AOA) estimation of a single source under fixed uniform circular arrays (UCAs).

Algebraic and explicit formulations for 2-D AOA estimation are first developed in the Fourier domain.

It is shown that three is the minimum number of antennas for 2-D AOA estimation based on phase measurement.

Then a signal model for phase extraction is established with equivalent phase noises through observations of signal samples corrupted by additive Gaussian white noise.

Under fixed UCAs, 2-D AOA estimation of a single source would suffer from phase ambiguity, and hence, ambiguity resolution is also addressed in the Fourier domain by integer search.

Numerical examples are provided to verify the effectiveness and appealing performance of the proposed 2-D AOA estimation algorithm.