Performance evaluation of direction of arrival estimation using MUSIC and ESPRIT algorithms for mobile communication systems

Source direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is one of the challenging problems in many applications. Such applications can be seen in wireless communications, radar, radio astronomy, sonar and navigation. The resolution of a source direction of arrival estimation can be enhanced by an array antenna system with innovative signal processing. Super resolution techniques take the advantage of array antenna structures to better process the incoming waves. These techniques also have the capability to identify the direction of multiple targets. This paper investigates performance of the DOA estimation algorithms namely; MUSIC and ESPRIT on the uniform linear array (ULA) in the presence of white noise. The performance of these DOA algorithms for a set of input parameters such as number of snapshots, number of array elements, signal-to-noise ratio are investigated. The simulation results showed that the resolution of the DOA techniques MUSIC and ESPRIT improves as number of snapshots, number of array elements, signal-to-noise ratio and separation angle between the two sources are increased.