Direction of arrival estimation with arbitrary virtual antenna arrays using low cost inertial measurement units

In this paper, we have investigated the use of virtual antenna arrays at the receiver to do single antenna direction-of-arrival estimation. The array coordinates are obtained by doing simple dead reckoning using acceleration and angular speed measurements from a low cost micro-electro-mechanical system inertial measurement unit (IMU). The proposed solution requires no extra hardware in terms of receiver chains and antenna elements. Direction-of-arrival estimation results are obtained using a high resolution SAGE algorithm. Measurement results show that the direction-of-arrival can be estimated with a reasonable accuracy in an indoor environment.