A novel algorithm of data association under multipath propagation

Many algorithms have been proposed to successfully estimate the direction of arrival (DOA) for paths of all sources under a multipath environment. Most of these algorithms do not provide any information on which source a detected path belongs to, i.e., DOA path and source association. However, information on such association is useful for identifying, locating, and tracking the sources. In this paper, based on the assumption that the DOAs of all paths have been detected by an existing method, a novel method for associating all paths to each source is proposed. Simulation results show that our method is reliable to associate the paths to their sources for narrowband as well as wideband signals.