Characterization of hardware impairments in multiple antenna systems for doa estimation

We consider the effects introduced by hardware impairments on the estimation of the direction of arrival (doa) deploying a multiple antenna radio system. we derive a system model from experimental measurements of a state-of-the-art hardware test bed based on an rf direct-conversion architecture. the system model includes dc offsets,carrier frequency and phase offsets,and the phase noise. then,we propose a simple digital compensation algorithm of the impairments for bidimensional doa estimation (azimuth and elevation) with a 3d orthogonal linear array. the robustness of the algorithm in terms of minimum-mean-squared error as a function of the hardware impairments is evaluated and compared with that achieved using the root-music algorithm. © 2011 daniele inserra and andrea m. tonello.