Three dimensional antenna array for the estimation of directions of arrival

International audienceDirection of arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple sources using an antenna array becomes very important in wireless communications. It is well known that the quality of the DOA estimation depends on the selected technique and algorithm but it also depends on the geometrical configuration of the antenna array used during the estimation. In this paper, we study the influence of the antenna array configurations on the Cramer-Rao bounds (CRB) of the 2-D DOA estimation problem as well as on the performance of the well known MUSIC algorithm. For this we consider the most known planar arrays and we propose a new 3-Dimentional antenna array. It appears that the proposed 3-D antenna array outperforms the other configurations as well as that already proposed in [20], in terms of both the CRB and the MUSIC root mean square estimation error (RMSE) and also removes ambiguities from the estimation MUSIC pseudo spectrum