Adaptive AoA Estimation and Beamforming with Hybrid Antenna Arrays

A new type of hybrid antenna array consisting of analogue subarrays followed by a digital beamformer is proposed for practical implementation of long range high data rate millimetre wave communications systems. An adaptive algorithm, referred to as the differential beam search (DBS), is proposed for the angle of arrival (AoA) estimation to control the phase shifters in the analogue subarrays and to perform digital beamforming. This algorithm does not need the knowledge of a reference signal and effectively solves the phase ambiguity problem in AoA estimation inherent to the practical subarray configuration. The performance of the proposed DBS algorithms is demonstrated by simulations.