Experimental Evaluation of AoA Algorithms using NI USRP Software Defined Radios

In the process of designing an access point with beamforming capabilities, the first step is to implement an accurate direction-finding method which determines the position of the targeted user and acts on the adaptive radiation pattern. As such, this paper presents a feasible solution to implement and test two Angle of Arrival algorithms: MUSIC and ESPRIT. The deployed testbed comprises five sub- systems: the transmitter, the uniform linear array antenna, the synchronization sub-system, the receiver and the data processing unit. The two algorithms are evaluated in six measurement scenarios employing linear arrays antennas of 4, 6 or 8 elements, with a target transmitter located at different measurement points. The measurement results show that MUSIC provides more accurate results when estimating the Angle of Arrival.