A Space-Time Coded Mills Cross MIMO Architecture to Improve DOA Estimation and Its Performance Evaluation by Field Experiments

Conventional Mills Cross architecture suffers from poor direction-of-arrival angle estimation accuracy in the dimension that the transmitter is aligned. To improve the estimation accuracy, a space-time coded, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) direction finding method, with complementary codes is presented. The performance of the suggested MIMO Mills Cross architecture has been evaluated by underwater field experiments. Field experiments confirm the feasibility of the proposed approach and illustrate the performance gains. Since the proposed approach does not require any changes in the conventional Mills Cross hardware, the performance improvement can also be realized by a software reconfiguration for existing legacy systems.