DoA estimation in multipath channels for packet transmission communication systems

This manuscript deals with the problem of direction of arrival (DoA) in multipath wireless channels with a line-of-sight (LOS) component. A cyclic prefixing (CP) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission technique is herein considered to show how the proposed methodology can be easily integrated into a data transmission system. The method basically consists of three steps: a frame synchronization and a channel estimation (which are shared with the data processing path), and finally the DoA estimation. The proposed procedure is general and does not rely on a particular synchronization mechanism or a specific channel estimation algorithm. A comparison between the use of two different DoA estimation methodologies (a low complexity DoA estimator applied to the first arrival path and a super-resolution algorithm using smooth-MUSIC) is described in this work to serve as a guideline for the appropriate method selection according to the specific application requirements.