Experimental study of direction-of-arrival estimation using reconfigurable antennas

In this paper, we present an experimental study evaluating the performance of a reconfigurable antenna element for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in wireless systems. We consider a reconfigurable antenna with directive radiation pattern and an electronic control mechanism to continuously scan its beam over the space. We implement a MUSIC-type algorithm which estimates the DOA using samples collected from different configurations (scanning steps) of the antenna radiation pattern. All experiments were carried out in an anechoic chamber using an actual reconfigurable antenna for different number of scanning steps. The results confirm the successful estimation of the DOA even with two scanning steps.