Investigation of direction-of-arrival estimation using uniform linear arrays with different antenna separations and array apertures

Performance of DOA estimation with the variations of the number of antenna elements (with a fixed aperture) and element separation (with a fixed number of elements) are studied using MPM. The results demonstrate that with a fixed array aperture, the accuracy of the estimated DOAs increases with the increase number of elements. With the same number of antenna elements, the accuracies of DOA become poor as the inter-element separation is reduced (aperture reduced). The findings indicate that an antenna separation of Delta ges 0.3 lambda (aperture ges 0.9 lambda ) is required in order to achieve good accuracies of DOA for this example. The findings in this work will be useful for designing compact array for DOA application. Further work will be focus on studying the performance of DOA estimation with different array configuration using practical antenna element together with the undesired mutual coupling taken into consideration using fullwave modeling