A Minimum Variance Noise Algorithm for 2D and 3D Direction Estimation in MIMO Wireless Communication Systems

Angle of arrival (AOA) estimation plays an essential role in several signal processing applications including tracking systems, beamforming technology and radar systems. An efficient AOA algorithm is proposed to find the direction of multiple arrival signal sources in 2D and 3D applications. The new method is called Minimum Variance Noise (MVN) and it depends upon the minimizing the output noise variance of an antenna array. The main idea and principal working of the MVN algorithm are presented and the mathematical model is derived. The Lagrange optimization technique is utilized to obtain the optimum weights. A computer simulation is carried out on linear and circular arrays including a wide range of scenarios to evaluate the estimation accuracy of the new algorithm. It is also compared with the popular AOA techniques and the results show that it gives better results with lower complexity.