Far‐field DOA estimation and near‐field localization for multipath signals

In direction finding and localization applications, multipath signals are important sources of error for parameter estimation. When the antenna array receives multipath reflections which are coherent with the far-field line-of-sight signal, estimating the far- and near-field components becomes an important problem. In this paper, a new method is proposed to estimate the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of the far-field source and to localize its near-field multipaths. Far-field source DOA is estimated using calibration of the antenna array. A near-to-far transformation is proposed for the estimation of the near-field source DOA angles. In order to estimate the near-field range parameters, a compressive sensing approach is presented where a dictionary with near-field sources with different ranges is employed. As a result, the proposed method estimates the far-field and near-field source DOAs as well as the range and the signal amplitudes of the near-field sources. This method is evaluated using close-to-real world data generated by a numerical electromagnetic tool, where the array and transmitter are placed in an irregular terrain and array data are generated using full 3-D propagation model. It is shown that unknown source parameters can be estimated effectively showing the potential of the proposed approach in applications involving high-frequency direction finding and indoor localization.