Distributed 6D Vector Antennas Design for Direction of Arrival Applications

We present a six-dimensional distributed vector sensor for Direction of Arrival estimation applications. A vector sensor should measure all 6 components of the electromagnetic field at the same location. Such sensor is motivated by recent analytical results, showing an improved estimation of the direction of arrival of the signal from a single source. Since the design of a collocated six-dimensional vector sensor is presently a major challenge, we consider a distributed approach for its design. Numerical simulations show that the performance of a distributed vector sensors in a multipath environment is greater than that of classical approaches with scalar arrays.