A novel direction of arrival estimation algorithm for WCDMA

Despite the controversies that surround the introduction of the third generation (3G) mobile telecommunication systems, the massive investment by industry and the constant demand for new technology and services are expected to usher in its eventual success. WCDMA is a dominant standard in the 3G system designed to succede the highly successful GSM standard. A new technology proposed for WCDMA is adaptive antennas. Among the challenges involved in the technology are downlink beamforming and mobile user localization whereby a reliable direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm could form part of the solution. In this paper, we propose a simple single-user approach to perform DOA estimation in WCDMA that is based on a well known space-time (2-D) rake receiver for uplink reception. We show that by incorporating some additional knowledge of the signal environment, promising improvement can be obtained. The algorithm is tested under the realistic COST259 channel model to further substantiate our claim.