DOA estimation method of electronically controlled beam-scanning LWA based on ESPRIT algorithm

A novel direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method based on electronically controlled beam scanning leaky-wave antenna (LWA) combined with estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) algorithm is proposed. In order to implement this method, a virtual partial pattern synthesis method is presented to construct an array manifold of subarrays from LWA for the ESPRIT algorithm. Then, the multi-channel receiver model and signal subspace are established based on the beam scanning property of LWA. As the traditional array antenna is substituted by LWA, the rotation operator of the algorithm has to be changed. From this point, the preprocessing ESPRIT algorithm based on the Hadamard product is proposed to extract the directional matrix of LWA. Numerical simulations are conducted, and the DOA performance is demonstrated through estimation error, response rate, and compared with the Cramer-Rao bound. Simulation results show that the DOA method utilising LWA exhibits satisfactory estimation performance and fast response speed. In addition, the influence of antenna parameters on the estimation accuracy and the method to improve the performance of DOA estimation for LWA are discussed.