Simultaneous Blind Estimation of Antenna Mutual Coupling and Direction of Arrival

In this paper, we propose a blind estimation method for the antenna mutual coupling matrix and the direction of arrival. First of all, the higher order cumulants based blind estimation method is used to calculate the steering vector of the array. The estimated steering vector can differ from the true steering vector by a factor of -1 or by exchanging of the real and imaginary parts. These differences as well as the direction of arrival and the mutual coupling matrix are estimated afterwards using the least square error criteria. Simulations show the proposed algorithm can converge to the exact solution very quickly and is suitable for the closely aligned antenna arrays for the massive multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) systems.