Practical direction-of-arrival system evaluation

A system-level, performance evaluation of a direction-of-arrival (DOA) receiver is presented to show that exclusively optimising a single processing step can produce poor overall results. Monte-Carlo simulations of DOA receiver systems with different receiver architectures, integration methods and DOA algorithms are presented and evaluated. It was found that the receiver design had a greater influence on the performance than the DOA algorithm, so more resources should be directed towards the receiver design than the DOA algorithm. Additionally, autocovariance matrix (ACM) integration is shown to be critical for reliable DOA and should therefore always be included in the system design. Suggestions as to which results are optimal for use in practical system development and the points where system-wide trade-offs should be considered are presented.