Joint Estimation of DOA and TDOA of Multiple Reflections by Matrix Pencil in Mobile Communications

This paper presents the joint estimation of the direction of arrival (DOA) and the time difference of arrival (TDOA) for multipath signals, which is the central issue for mobile communications. The estimator decouples the multi-dimensional problem for realizing the high resolution of DOA and TDOA based on the matrix pencil method without the computation of the correlation matrix. First, the data are transformed into the frequency domain to deconvolution by the known channel model, which maps delays into phase shifts in the frequency domain. Then, a two-dimensional matrix pencil algorithm yields the joint DOA and TDOA estimation based on the double Vandermonde structure data obtained. A closed-form solution without searching is given with the DOA and TDOA of incidence that can be paired automatically without an additional matching algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is not only suitable for the case that the elements' number is less than the source number but also for the case that multipath rays have equal DOA or TDOA.