Compressive Direction of Arrival Estimation with Wave-chaotic Antennas

We present the compressive sensing technique in the context of single-pixel computational direction of arrival estimation (DoA) at millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies. It is shown that the physical layer compression achieved using wave-chaotic antennas can substantially reduce the number of channels for DoA estimation. The compressive DoA concept is verified using two wave-chaotic antenna paradigms; frequency-diversity and dynamic aperture, and a comparison between the two modalities is studied. The presented compressive DoA concept facilitates DoA estimation of an arbitrary number of far-field sources using a single data acquisition channel and is robust to noise. As a practical application, we successfully demonstrate the simultaneous DoA estimation of 10 far-field sources with a signal-to-noise (SNR) level of as low as 0 dB.