Correlation based direction of arrival estimation for the large scale multi-user MIMO system

It is well known that accurate direction of arrival (DOA) estimation can help to improve the performance of MIMO systems. However, when large scale MIMO systems are considered, the DOA estimation becomes very difficult due to the large dimension of DOAs. Based on the observation that correlation exists between the neighboring antennas due to the limited size of the antenna array, we propose a correlation based DOA estimation method for the large scale multi-user (MU) MIMO system in this paper. It is verified that the proposed DOA estimation method can obtain a better performance than the existing methods with a much lower computational complexity.