Number of Sources Detection and AoA Estimation of a Wireless Transmitter in Multipath Channels

Detecting the number of sources from which the signal of a single wireless transmitter has originated, as well as estimating its angle-of-arrival (AoA), are critical parameters for a plethora of remote sensing applications (e.g. military, localization, radio-astronomy, etc.). A rather interesting observation is that these two problems are inter-twined since the most popular solution is based on eigenvalue decomposition (EGD) of the correlation matrix of the received signal. The Akaike information criterio (AIC) has been used in conjunction with EGD for detecting the number of sources or the number of AoAs (the later is a pre-requisite for AoA estimation). In this work we present an algorithm for a two-step application of AIC so that we can detect simultaneously the number of sources and AoAs for a MIMO transmitter that operates in a multipath environment. Results indicate the good performance of the proposed scheme for different multipath topologies and system configurations.