FPGA IMPLEMENTATION OF ADAPTIVE ZERO-TRACKING ALGORITHM FOR REAL-TIME DOA ESTIMATION USING A LINEAR ANTENNA ARRAY

In this paper, we employed blind separation techniques to estimate the direction of arrival (DOA) in a smart antenna system. Indeed, we have processed the antenna’s output signal through the Symmetric Pre-Whitening algorithm in order to isolate each incident wave. Since we are interested by defining the DOA of strongest wave, we have characterized each separated wave using the power spectral density. The most powerful wave is then modeled by a three order autoregressive model whose complex zeros, computed and tracked adaptively, will be plotted in the unit circle. After convergence of the zero-tracking process, we assumed that the DOA corresponds to the phase of the zeros whereas the radius will give an idea on its magnitude. To assess the efficiency of the developed method in real-time, we compared the simulation results with those obtained from implementing the Symmetric Pre-Whitening and zero-tracking algorithms on the Artix-7 FPGA board. The results obtained by simulation and hardware implementation are quite similar.