REDUCING THE ARRAY SIZE FOR DOA ESTIMATION BY AN ANTENNA MODE SWITCH TECHNIQUE

In this paper, an antenna-mode-switch technique is proposed to reduce the array size for the DOA (direction-of-arrival) estimation. Conventional DOA estimation requires many elements of antenna array to achieve high resolution, and then suffers from large array size. To improve such disadvantages, this paper proposes an antenna-mode-switch technique to reduce the required number of array elements. Numerical simulation shows that the required number of array elements will be greatly reduced by using the proposed technique. Furthermore, the bow-tie antenna design for implementing the proposed antenna-mode-switch technique is also given. The result proves that high-resolution and accurate properties of such a practical antenna design is very close to those of the ideal antenna mode.