Simulated performance of antenna position estimation through sub-sampled exponential analysis

Abstract

Antenna position estimation is an important problem in large irregular arrays where the positions might not be known very accurately from the start. In a previous paper we presented a method using harmonically related signals transmitted from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), with the added advantage that the UAV can be in the near-field of the receiving antenna array. It was shown that the method delivers excellent results using ideal synthetic data with added noise. In this paper we continue the work by simulating the problem in a full-wave solver. Although the results are less accurate than when synthetic data are used, due to the effects of mutual coupling, the method still performs satisfactorily, with errors smaller than 4% of the smallest transmitted wavelength.