An Iterative DoA Estimation Method for Uniform Circular Arrays with Weighted Baselines

Direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation is an essential technique in wireless communication, which is widely used for many applications. With the ever-increasing demand of the applications for real-time DoA estimation, phase interferometer-based methods are popular because of their extremely low computational complexity. In this paper, a phase interferometer with an iterative mechanism is proposed for two-dimensional (2D) DoA estimation with a uniform circular array. The phase differences of the selected antenna baselines are the inputs of the proposed method, which are calculated from the received signal. In the proposed method, the 2D DoA is solved by the iterative weighted least squares method based on the relations between the DoA and the phase differences, where the weights are assigned to different baselines and are designed with reference to the noise resistance capability of the corresponding phase differences. Additionally, the weights are updated with iterations. The simulation results indicate that when compared with the benchmarks, the DoA estimation with the proposed method enjoys superior estimation performance without compromising computational complexity.