Signal processing strategies for six-port based Direction of Arrival detector systems

Direction of Arrival (DOA) detection for industrial positioning is a relevant topic. Several applications make use of the six-port technology to perform phase difference based DOA measurements. The six-port receiver offers high accuracy, robustness and a low cost solution. The ability of this device to precisely measure a phase difference (hence a DOA angle) implies a correct acquisition of the signals delivered from the six-port detector as well as a correct digital signal processing. In this paper a dedicated acquisition platform for the six-port DOA detector is presented. Moreover, different software strategies to compute the DOA angle have been evaluated for an FPGA. Different types of algorithms have been implemented and compared using accuracy and throughput as references.