DoA Estimation with Sparse Arrays: Effects of Antenna Element Patterns and Nonidealities

TL;DR

This paper investigates how directional antenna element patterns and nonidealities affect DoA estimation, demonstrating that sparse arrays with directional elements significantly improve accuracy and coverage over traditional uniform arrays.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of sparse and uniform arrays considering realistic antenna patterns and mutual coupling, highlighting the advantages of sparse arrays with directional elements.

Findings

Over 90% reduction in direction finding error with sparse arrays and directional antennas.

4 to 15-fold increase in coverage distance for the same angular RMSE.

Sparse arrays with directional elements outperform uniform arrays in accuracy and operational range.

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of directional antenna element complex gain patterns and nonidealities in direction of arrival (DoA) estimation. We compare sparse arrays and classical uniform linear arrays, harnessing EM simulation tools to accurately model the electromagnetic behavior of both patch and Vivaldi antenna element including mutual coupling effects. We show that with sparse array configurations, the performance impacts are significant in terms of DoA estimation accuracy and operable SNR ranges. Specifically, in the scenarios considered, both the usage of directional antenna elements and a sparse array result in over 90% reduction in average direction finding error, compared to a uniform omnidirectional array with the same number of elements (in this case eight), when estimating the directions of two sources using the MUSIC algorithm. For a fixed angular RMSE, the improvements in array sensitivity are shown to yield a 4 to 15-fold increase in one-way coverage distance (assuming free-space path loss). Among the studied options, the best performance was obtained using sparse arrays with either patch or Vivaldi elements for field of views of 100$^\circ$ or 120$^\circ$, respectively.