Compressive sensing in Direction of Arrival (DOA) applications. A comparative study on different acquisition systems

Nowadays, many technologies and algorithms are available for the DOA estimation, aimed at satisfying the both the accuracy requirements and the antenna installation constraints. The authors propose here a comparative study on different choices of antenna systems designed for the DOA estimation, performed with a compressive sensing approach. This work is organized as follows. After a brief introduction on the DOA estimation systems and compressive sensing algorithms, we apply a compressive sensing algorithm to both vector and standard antenna array systems. In order to evaluate the best obtainable performances , we consider only ideal scenarios, excluding all non-idealities such, e.g., antenna coupling, ground effects, etc.. The whole study is performed by making use of computer simulations. Mainly, we study the classic vector antenna system composed of three electric dipoles and three magnetic loops mutually orthogonal and the L-shaped array. We assume that the impinging wave is linearly or circularly polarized and the noise is additive, white and Gaussian. The DOA estimation is performed with the algorithm developed by the authors and published in a previous paper [1]. The performance estimation is evaluated by taking into account the Root Mean Square (RMS) estimation error as function of the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and, for array antenna systems, the number of elements. The results are discussed in order to highlight the differences between the proposed scenarios in relation with the technical characteristics of each antenna system , installation requirements, working band, etc. In the conclusions, we give our point of view with respect to the application of compressive sensing on the DOA estimation, providing some guidelines for its application depending on the actual scenario under investigation.