Direction of arrival estimation in smart antenna for marine communication

A communication link between fishing vessels or with the sea shore using Wi-Fi is explored in this paper. For effective communication a high gain antenna is mounted at the sea shore which acts as base station (BS). Although narrow band directional antenna used in the Base Station (BS) ensures the connectivity for a long distance, the coverage will be poor without any steering mechanism, as the antenna beam is fixed in a particular direction. The proposed smart antenna with adaptive beamforming and multiple access technique can ensure the coverage without losing connectivity at long distance. The main objective is to find the Direction of Arrival (DoA) of the received signal from the fishing vessel moving at a constant velocity for adaptive steering of the antenna beam. The DoA parameter gives the phase and amplitude of the signal transmitted from the fishing vessel. The same phase and amplitude help to calculate the beam forming vectors in the smart antenna and it adaptively steers the beam towards fishing vessel. This paper describes how DoA estimation can apply to a beam forming Wi-Fi antenna array which is used for marine communication, and give a mathematical model of DoA estimation.