Method and apparatus for determining a direction of arrival of a signal
AssigneeMotorola, Inc.
InventorsRaymon Owen, Jun Xiang
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
The invention provides a method and apparatus for determining the direction of a signal such as for example a received radio signal in a cellular mobile communication system. At lest two antenna arrays (10, 12) are connected to associated processors (14, 16) for extracting the desired signal and two independent direction of arrival estimates are determined in associated direction estimators (18, 20). A similarity testing unit (22) determines the direction of arrival and the accuracy of this estimate from the difference between the two estimates. A feature of the invention is controlling the beam form of a downlink signal in response to the direction estimate and the determined accuracy.
Claims14
A method of determining a direction of arrival of a received signal including the steps of:
- obtaining a first estimate of a direction of arrival of the received signal from a first sensor (10),
- obtaining at least a second estimate of the direction of arrival of the received signal from at least a second sensor (12), and characterised by comprising the step of
- determining a direction of arrival estimate of the received signal as a function of both the first and at least second estimate.
An apparatus for determining a direction of arrival of a received signal including:
- a first estimator (18) generating a first estimate of a direction of the received signal from a first sensor (10),
- at least a second estimator (20) generating a second estimate of the direction of the received signal from a second sensor (12), and characterised by including,
- a controller for determining a direction of arrival estimate of the received radio signal as a function of both said first and at least second estimate.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.