Fine-grained azimuthal direction of arrival estimation using received signal strengths

We propose a direction of arrival (DoA) estimation technique, which is enabled by a single printed patch antenna capable of four reconfigurable beams at the operative frequency of 2.45 GHz. The direction of the messages sent by a nomadic wireless node is estimated and stored without the need of lengthy offline measurements, by correlating the real-time received signal strength actual data and the expected antenna beams. The comparison is implemented with a least square technique with an extremely reduced computational cost. Experimental validations demonstrate the DoA estimation capability, with a mean error <2.3° with a variance of 1.9° within a domain of 90°