FPGA‐based real‐time implementation for direction‐of‐arrival estimation

Abstract

Direction‐of‐arrival (DOA) estimation of radio signals is of utmost importance in many commercial and military applications. In this study, the authors propose an efficient field‐programmable gate array (FPGA) architecture for implementing a recently published DOA estimation algorithm. This algorithm estimates DOAs by making use of QR decomposition of the received data matrix of four‐ and eight‐element uniform linear antenna arrays. The hardware implementation has been thoroughly analysed and experimentally validated by building a real‐time prototype of the DOA estimation algorithm. The experimental results show good agreement between DOA estimates obtained by the prototype and true values.