Improvement of Capon DOA estimation by antenna mode switch techniques

In this paper, the antenna mode switch technique is applied to Capon DOA (direction of arrival) estimation of signal sources. The Capon method is a well-known DOA estimation algorithm. However, it often needs a large antenna array to achieve good resolution so that the cost and computation efforts are increased. To achieve good resolution without increasing the number of array elements, our antenna mode switch technique is added to Capon DOA computation. The antenna mode switch technique is a special antenna pattern which reduces the interference from spatial region not being scanned. Such a special antenna pattern can be experimentally implemented. Numerical simulation results show that using our antenna mode switch in Capon DOA computation can significantly improve the resolution. It can be applied to small portable devices of modern wireless communication.