Coupling Characterization of a Linear Dipole Array to Improve Direction-of-Arrival Estimation

The reciprocity theorem is applied to account for the electromagnetic coupling among antennas in a linear dipole array, in the presence of multiple incident plane waves. By utilizing the direction-dependent coupling information, the direction-of-arrivals of the incident waves can be estimated more accurately by using the conventional ESPRIT (estimation of signal parameter via rotational invariance technique). Different coupling compensation methods in the literatures are compared to validate this method, and multiple incident waves of both uncorrelated and coherent nature are also simulated.