Effective mutual coupling compensation for direction-of-arrival estimations using a new, accurate determination method for the receiving mutual impedance

Journal article, 2010

Performance degradation due to the mutual coupling effect of antenna arrays in direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimations has been well known, and many mutual coupling compensation methods have been proposed throughout the years. In particular, the mutual coupling effect becomes significant when the antenna elements are closely spaced, which is difficult to compensate. In this paper, a new, accurate method is introduced to determine the receiving mutual impedances of antenna arrays with closely spaced omni-directional antenna elements. This new method uses a number of plane wave sources coming from different directions to determine the receiving mutual impedances of a particular antenna element with all other antenna elements in the array in a single step. This step is repeated for all the antenna elements in the array, and the full mutual impedance matrix of the array is thus obtained. Using the Matrix Pencil Method (MPM), DOA estimations using eight-element arrays were used to demonstrate the validity and accuracy of this new method.