Characterization of Hardware Impairments in Multiple Antenna Systems for DoA Estimation

Abstract EN

We consider the effects introduced by hardware impairments on the estimation of the direction of arrival (DoA) deploying a multiple antenna radio system.

We derive a system model from experimental measurements of a state-of-the-art hardware test bed based on an RF direct-conversion architecture.

The system model includes DC offsets, carrier frequency and phase offsets, and the phase noise.

Then, we propose a simple digital compensation algorithm of the impairments for bidimensional DoA estimation (azimuth and elevation) with a 3D orthogonal linear array.

The robustness of the algorithm in terms of minimum-mean-squared error as a function of the hardware impairments is evaluated and compared with that achieved using the root-MUSIC algorithm.