Optimization of the antenna array geometry based on a Bayesian DOA estimation criterion

Houcem Gazzah (1) , Jean-Pierre Delmas (2, 3, 4, 5)

1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (University of Sharjah)
2 TIPIC-SAMOVAR - Traitement de l'Information Pour Images et Communications
3 TSP - CITI - Communications, Images et Traitement de l'Information
4 SAMOVAR - Services répartis, Architectures, MOdélisation, Validation, Administration des Réseaux
5 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

In this paper, we address the problem of the sensor placement for estimating the direction of a narrow-band source, randomly located in the far-field of a planar antenna array. Estimation performance is evaluated by means of the expectation of the conditional Cramer Rao bound (ECRB), which depends on the prior probabilistic distribution of the DOA angles. We study the particular, but practical, case where the azimuth angle is uniformly distributed. Surprisingly, it turns out that the optimal arrays are not isotropic, i.e. they do not have the same accuracy in all possible look directions. In fact, optimal arrays computed here increase performance by about 10% compared to optimal isotropic arrays computed in a previous work

Mots clés: Direction of arrival estimation

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Houcem Gazzah, Jean-Pierre Delmas. Optimization of the antenna array geometry based on a Bayesian DOA estimation criterion. ICASSP 2011 : 36th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, May 2011, Prague, Czech Republic. pp.2544-2547, ⟨10.1109/ICASSP.2011.5947003⟩. ⟨hal-01302427⟩