AoA Estimation in Dual-Polarization Virtual Sub-Arrays for Analog Beam Refinement

This work proposes an angle of arrival (AoA) estimator for analog beam refinement in cellular systems operating in millimeter wave (mmWave) bands. Differently from previous works, the proposed method exploits the polarization domain and the concept of virtual arrays to estimate the AoA through a cross-correlation function. The proposed AoA estimator requires only a polarization-multiplexed measurement to estimate the AoA at the receiver. To cope with polarization leakage issues, this work proposes a channel equalization in the polarization domain conditioned on the estimation of the cross-channel gain. Simulation results indicate that the beam refinement procedure with the proposed AoA estimator has similar performance to the classical beam sweeping, but using less time-multiplexed measurements.

Journal of Communication and Information Systems