A Simple Cross Correlation Switched Beam System (XSBS) for Angle of Arrival Estimation

We propose a practical, simple and hardware friendly, yet novel and efficient, angle of arrival (AoA) estimation system. Our intuitive, two-phases cross-correlation-based system requires a switched beam antenna array with a single radio frequency circuitry, which is used to collect an omni-directional reference signal using a single element of the antenna array in the first phase. Our system applies energy detection on the collected reference signal to decide on the presence or absence of a transmitted signal. In the second phase, the system steers the main beam to scan the angular region of interest. The collected signal from each beam angle is cross correlated with the omni-directional reference signal to determine the angle of arrival of the received signal. The combined practicality and high efficiency of our system is demonstrated through performance and complexity comparisons with one of the literature's best performing multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm. Our proposed AoA estimation system has a negligible root mean square error at signal to noise ratio level greater than -16 dB, which is very comparable to MUSIC.