Optimum ambiguity-free directive planar antenna arrays

The ability to detect more or less accurately the Direction Of Arrival (DOA) of an emitting source depends on the actual DOA. It makes sense to study the DOA estimation error in the direction where it is the lowest possible, and in a neighborhood of this direction that we refer to as the aperture. A performance measure is derived from the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) and is evaluated relatively to the aperture. Constraints on the sensors positions are introduced to avoid array ambiguities. The resulting constrained optimization problem is solved numerically and leads to the computation of the optimal array geometry with a specified directional behavior.