High-resolution angle-of-arrival measurements on physically-nonstationary mobile radio channels

A high-resolution measurement system for the characterization of the delay and angle-of-arrival properties of all significant multipath components on mobile radio channels is presented. The system uses complex impulse response data obtained from a novel 3-D tilted cross switched antenna array as input to an improved version of 3-D Unitary ESPRIT. Results from simulations and measurements show that the approach is capable of accurately characterizing the delay and angle-of-arrival characteristics of the dominant multipath components at moderate urban speeds along a trajectory in mobile propagation environments with high resolution in both azimuth and elevation. Index Terms--Channel sounder, cross arrays, delay estimation, direction of arrival estimation, land mobile radio, mobile communications, radiowave propagation.