Three-dimensional antennas array for the estimation of direction of arrival

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple sources using an antenna array becomes very important in wireless communications. It is well known that the quality of the DOA estimation depends on the selected technique and algorithm but it also depends on the geometrical configuration of the antenna array used during the estimation. The authors study the influence of the antenna array configurations on the Cramer?Rao bounds (CRB) of the 2D DOA estimation problem as well as on the performance of the well known MUSIC algorithm. For this we consider the most known planar arrays and we propose a 2-L shaped 3D antennas array. It appears that this 3D antennas array outperforms the other configurations as well as that already proposed in Tayem and Kwon (2005), in terms of both the CRB and the MUSIC root mean square estimation error and also removes ambiguities from the estimation MUSIC pseudo spectrum.