Joint delay and direction of arrivals estimation in mobile communications

In this paper, we present a novel and precise way of estimating the direction and delay of arrivals in multipath environment for channel estimation purposes. Recently, super-resolution methods have been widely used for high-resolution direction of arrival (DOA) or time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimation. The proposed algorithm, called JDTDOA, is applicable to space–time channel estimation for space–time processing systems that employ hybrid DOA/TDOA technology. The estimator is based on conventional MUSIC algorithm to find the DOA and uses a standard correlator along with spline interpolation to find the TDOA of each arrival. In the interest of estimating the channel’s characteristics, each direction must be associated with its proper delay of arrival. To achieve this, we suggest a very simple and optimum beamforming by performing maximum variance distortionless response applied to each DOA found. The output at each DOA beamforming process gives the recovered signal from the relevant direction. A correlation is then made between each recovered signals which can be interpolated by cubic spline. The peak in correlation figure indicates the specific delay between the signal arrivals coming from the two considered direction.