Joint estimation of propagation delay and direction of arrival of multipath signals

In this paper, we present an algorithm named MUSIC-MODE for jointly estimating the propagation time delays and the directions of arrival (DOAs) of multipath signals from a mobile station received at an array antenna. This algorithm is modified from the time-space-time multiple signal classification (TST-MUSIC) algorithm to reduce the computational complexity, but still obtains high accuracy result. A method of direction estimation (MODE) is applied to estimate the DOAs instead of the spatial-MUSIC (S-MUSIC) algorithm. Since it offers the advantage of better performance, especially in situations where the incoming signals are highly correlated. However, the temporal-MUSIC (T-MUSIC) is still utilized to group the incoming signals and to estimate the propagation delays. The propagation delays and DOAs can be estimated in the case of the number of incoming signals are greater than the number of antennas. Furthermore, the simulation results clearly illustrate that the presented algorithm can also resolve the incoming signals with either close in delays or close in DOAs. Additionally, when high resolution of estimated DOA is required, the computation time of the proposed algorithm is less than the one produced by TST-MUSIC.