Direction finding in multipath environments using moving uniform circular arrays

In this paper, we propose a novel pre-processing method for the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple sources in multipath environments. In such environments, radio signals impinging on an antenna array can be either uncorrelated, partially correlated or fully correlated (or coherent signals). The proposed pre-processing technique consists of receiving the radio signals at different time instants while moving the uniform circular array (UCA) in predefined paths. The signal covariance matrix is rendered full rank by averaging the sample covariance matrix estimated from the radio signals impinging on the moving UCA. As a result, conventional super-resolution algorithms such as MUSIC can be applied. The simulation results have shown the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with classical pre-processing techniques.