Abstract —Electromagnetic vector sensor arrays have been widely applied in the communication, radio, navigation, and so on. The application of electromagnetic vector sensor antenna array will greatly improve the overall performance of the communication system. In this paper, a novel quaternion-ESPRIT (estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques) algorithm for direction finding and positioning based on COLD (cocentered orthogonal loop and dipole) uniform linear array (COLD-ULA) is proposed. First, quaternion data model of COLD-ULA is deduced and constructed. Second, the array steering vector and the angle of arrival (DOA) are estimated using a quaternion eigenvalue decomposition of the data covariance matrix. Finally, the estimation of polarization parameters are required using the relationships between the dipoles and the loops. The proposed technique not only decouples the DOA estimation information from the polarization estimation information, but also improves the ability of signal detection. Moreover, the proposed technique has the advantage of small amount of calculation and parameter automatic matching. Simulation results show that the performance of quaternion method is obviously better than that of the long-vector method.
 
Index Terms—Array signal processing, direction of arrival, quaternion-ESPRIT, polarization, antenna array, subspace

Cite: Lanmei Wang, Zhihai Chen, and Guibao Wang, "Direction Finding and Positioning Algorithm with COLD-ULA Based on Quaternion Theory," Journal of Communications, vol. 9, no. 10, pp. 778-784, 2014. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.9.10.778-784