Direction of Arrival estimation of an arbitrary oriented targets by a highly directive antenna and coarse RSSI data

Abstract

In this paper we propose a Direction of Arrival (DoA) positioning system based on a switched six-beams antenna operating in Circular Polarization at 2.45 GHz. The system is intended to operate 1D localization of generic device equipped with a common monopole antenna. The DoA estimation is possible regardless of the target antenna orientation. The system operates in circular polarization and it is designed to work without any form of calibration. We demonstrate that, in an anechoic setup, the mean errors for the DoA estimations are around 5 or 6 degrees for a wide range of target antenna orientations, while not exceed 11 degrees even in the worst case of deep fading. When operating in a complex indoor environment, the localization performance slightly degrades, but the reported experiments demonstrate that the average error is still under 10 degrees for the most common cases.