Direction-of-Arrival estimation using virtual
dual-antenna receivers : algorithms and controlled
experiments.
Youssef Agram Jianqiao Cheng
Brussels School of Engineering Brussels School of Engineering
Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
Brussels, Belgium Brussels, Belgium
Youssef.Agram@ulb.be Jianqiao.Cheng@ulb.be
Abstract—Localization of radio-frequency (RF) transmitters
can be achieved using virtual antenna arrays (VAA) through
direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation. The method relies on a
mobile, single-antenna receiver that captures successive messages
from a transmitter, thereby emulating a multi-antenna array.
However, two main challenges emerge from this technique: 1)
Successive positions and orientations of antennas have to be de-
termined, meeting spatial Nyquist criterion; 2) the local oscillator
frequency offset (LOFO) between transmitter and receiver adds a
drifting phase component to the received signal on each antenna
of the array. Previous papers have shown the unability to recover
the DoA for rectilinear trajectories using single-antenna array in
presence of drifting LOFO. Nonetheless, it has been theoretically
proven that integration of a second antenna allows us to return to
an observable system. In this paper, we extend the algorithm to
dual-antenna receivers, which allows to recover the azimuth θ. A
linear model of the drifting LOFO is also used, allowing for low-
quality, drifting Local Oscillators (LOs). Wireless and controlled
experimental results from a software-defined radio testbench are
presented to corroborate previous theoretical results. Increased
performance is noted when moving from a single antenna to a
dual-antenna system.
Index Terms—Virtual multi-antenna array (VAA), RF Local-
ization, Direction-of-arrival (DOA), Beamforming.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Localization of radio frequency (RF) transmitters and re-
ceivers for current and future wireless systems has been at
the center of discussions. This technology becomes central
when Global Positioning System (GPS) is not available. Also
with deployment of 5G technology [1] and increasing number
of Location Based Services (LBS) [2]. In over-the-air local-
ization, spatial metrics such as direction-of-arrival (DoA) are
a true asset compared to time-based metrics which require
synchronization between anchor nodes [3]. In addition to high
cost and power consumption [4], the major drawback of classic
DoA estimation is the need of physically large multi-antenna
arrays [5], which makes the technique unsuitable for portable
consumer electronics.
Previous work advised the use of another formalism for
DoA estimation to localize a transmitter (TX). Conventionally,
virtual antenna arrays (VAA) rely on moving, single-antenna
François Quitin
Brussels School of Engineering
Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
Brussels, Belgium
Francois.Quitin@ulb.be
receivers that capture multiple messages from TX along their
trajectory. All successive positions will act as antenna elements
to form what we call a virtual antenna array.
However, this model has in reality two main stakes:
1) The successive positions of the antenna array should be
estimated with an accuracy of at least half a wavelength.
2) Since packets are received at different timestamps and
that RX/TX’s clocks are not synchronized, LOFO be-
tween TX and RX will introduce accumulated phase-
shift in received packets. LOFO then needs to be esti-
mated and compensated.
Related work: VAAs have already been used for a decade
or so e.g. for channel sounding [6] but none considered
introduced challenges. First, accurate positioning systems were
used to generate and estimate the device trajectory. Second,
TX and RX were synchronized through cables. Other works
have performed DoA estimation and positioning in presence
of MPCs [7] [8]. They used IMUs for position estimation but
considered very low values for the LOFO i.e. around 0.1 Hz.
In [7], a custom channel sounder is used where both TX and
RX embed rubidium LO which are known to be extremely
stable to the point where LOFO is negligible [9]. Our latest
works considered a LOFO of about 10 Hz and short motion
of 30 cm [10].
Contributions: Figure 1 however shows the LOFO mea-
sured on our software-defined radios embedding low-quality
oscillator. One can see we are dealing with offset having order
of magnitude above but the most critical issue is its unstable
and noisy behavior. We already introduced a model for linearly
drifting LOFO in [11]. We also extended the theoretical
observability analysis of DoA on dual-antenna arrays, already
performed on single-antenna arrays [10]. Due to LOFO, results
have shown that it was impossible to recover the DoA in a
1D trajectory using single-antenna array whereas dual-antenna
array can. The purpose of this paper is to corroborate the above
theoretical results with true wireless experimental results. The
content can be summarized as follows:
• We consider the use of dual-antenna receivers extending
 the virtual DoA estimation algorithms to account for two Equation 1 carries two separate dynamic contributions on the
antenna elements. phase of received packets. One is due to motion and the
• We consider a LO model that accounts for a linearly drift- other to LOFO. The following two sections present two major
ing LOFO, as can be observed in low-quality oscillator. drawbacks arising in the virtual formalism.
• We provide a comparison between single vs. dual-antenna
B. Receiver position estimation
receivers performing a 1D wireless trajectory of about 1.5
m. The first drawback concerns successive positions of antenna
A that needs to be estimated for each received packet. Since
170 Nyquist spatial criterion should be satisfied i.e. k~ pA [n] −
A λ
p~ [n − 1]k2 < 2 ∀n, we need to estimate positions with an ac-
160 curacy smaller than a fraction-of-a-wavelength. This problem
LOFO (Hz)

can be addressed with the use of inertial measurements units

150 (IMUs). Acceleration and gyroscope measurements can be
integrated in a tracking filter such as Unscended Kalman Filter
140 (UKF) [13]. Estimated orientation serves to convert kinematic
quantities from body (local) to global frame [14].
15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Time (s) C. LOFO estimation
The second drawback is related to the LOFO which also
Fig. 1. Measured Local Oscillator Frequency Offset (LOFO) on USRP E312
software-defined radios.
needs to be estimated since it brings undesired phase contri-
bution. According to Figure 1, a time linear model is suitable
to model the drift of the LOFO:
II. V IRTUAL D OA ESTIMATION ALGORITHM
f0 [n] = β0 + β1 · t[n] (2)
This section extends the DoA estimation algorithm for
VAAs already proposed in [12] and [10]. A general system where β0 and β1 are unknown real parameters. If we assume
model for a dual-antenna array moving along a 3D trajectory is f0 constant within a packet, we obtain the final expressions
considered with linearly drifting LOFO. However, only linear of received packets at antenna A by injecting Equation 2 into
trajectory will be considered in Sections III and IV. 1. rB is obtained by replacing indices A by B.
Since front-ends associated to antennas A and B are driven
A. Dual-antenna system by the same local oscillator, we can assume that their LOFO
Let us consider a dual-antenna receiver made of antennas contribution is identical. Expressions can be even more sim-
A and B which moves with respect to a fixed East-North- plified:
Up (ENU) global frame. The transmitter is assumed static • If the receiver is appropriately calibrated, the phase-shift
and sends identical periodic packets with period T0 while between the two front-ends should be first estimated and
their baseband representation is given by s[m] (where m = then compensated such that φA B
0 = φ0 = φ0 .
1, ..., M ). Those are considered as known by the receiver array • Received signal power can be normalized such that α =
A
since it could be preambles of a given communication standard αB = α.
such as PSS sequence broadcast by LTE base stations. If we
D. Signal model
focus on line-of-sight, narrowband channel, we can express
rA [n, m] the m-th baseband sample of the n-th received packet The purpose now is to derive a signal model that will be
(where n = 1, ..., N ) as: used as input to our DoA estimator. Let us write the full system
by stacking received data on both antennas:
tn +mT
R s
j(φA
0 +2π f0 (τ )dτ )  A  A  A
rA [n, m] = αA · e t1 r a w
= ⊗ x + (3)
~ A rB aB wB
[n]
· s[m] · ej k(θ,ϕ)·~p + wA [n, m] (1) | {z }
A(β0 ,β1 ,θ,φ)
where αA is the complex channel amplitude seen by antenna A B
r and r are N ×M matrices. A(β0 , β1 , θ, ϕ) is the steering
A, ~k(θ, ϕ) is the wave vector which depending on the azimuth
vector of the virtual, dual-antenna array. It contains samples
and elevation angles respectively and p~A [n] are the coordinates
from antenna A and B:
of antenna A in the ENU frame when receiving the n-th packet.    
t2 [n]
φA j 2π β0 t[n]+β1 2 +~ pA [n]
k(θ,ϕ)·~
0 is the phase of the initial received packet (which contains A
a [n] = e
the phase offset and accumulated frequency offset between the  
t2 [n]
 
j 2π β0 t[n]+β1 2 +~ pB [n]
k(θ,ϕ)·~
TX and RXA front-ends when first packet is received i.e. t[1], B
a [n] = e
f0 is the LOFO between the TX and RX, tn is the elapsed
which are stacked to form the column vector A. Finally, the
time between the first packet and the n-th packet (= t[n]), Ts
vector x is a row vector containing the known samples:
stands for the receiver sample time and wA represents an i.i.d
white Gaussian noise with distribution wA ∼ CN (0, σ 2 ). x[m] = α · ejφ0 · s[m]
System 3 is a nonlinear regression in unknown parameters. then used for phase-compensation of packets received in
Conventional DoA estimation such as MUSIC [15], ESPRIT motion (i.e. rmov ) as follows:
[16] or Beamforming [17] can be used to compute estimates. β1 2

In case of Beamforming, we need to compute the beamforming

′
rmov [n, m] = rmov e−j2π(β0 t[n]+ 2 t [n] )
spectrum as follows: • Joint Estimation (JE) approach jointly estimates f0 and
∗
PBF (β0 , β1 , θ, ϕ) = A · R · A (4) θ using Beamforming spectrum as explained previously.

where R denotes the autocorrelation matrix of the received IMU a Trajectory p

signals. Therefore, the problem of finding the DoA (alongside Measurements
Reconstruction

the parameters β0 and β1 ) is reduced to a four-dimensional

search: Joint Estimation (JE) p
rmov[n,m] approach rmov[n,m] Joint LOFO and AOA
  Estimation
Received packets r[n,m] ^
(β̂0 , β̂1 , θ̂, ϕ̂) = arg max PBF (β0 , β1 , θ, ϕ) (5) f0,joint
β0 ,β1 ,θ,ϕ
Measurement 
^
joint
rSS[n,m]
rmov[n,m]
p

^
SaS
AOA
This algorithm corresponds to the Joint Estimation (JE) ap- LOFO LOFO
Estimation
Stop and Start (SaS) Estimation ^ Compensation r'
mov[n,m]
proach which will applied in case of 1D linear trajectory in approach
f0,SaS

the following section.

E. LOFO and (non)-observability Fig. 2. Flow diagram of the DoA estimator. IMU processing is highlighted
in blue. SaS and Joint Estimation (JE) approaches are used in parallel.
In [11], the scenario has been reduced to a 1D trajectory
to theoretically determine whether the DoA is observable i.e.
whether it is possible to infer the DoA from measured signals III. E XPERIMENTAL SETUP
[18]. We ended with the following results: In this section, we describe the experimental setup used to
perform a linear 1D trajectory.
TABLE I
N ON - OBSERVABLE STATES A. Experimental setup
Constant LOFO Linearly drifting LOFO Linear trajectory experiments have been performed in an
f 0 = β0 f 0 = β0 + β1 t anechoic chamber to benefit from high SNR without MPCs
Single-antenna θ if ax = 0 θ
Dual-antenna - - during our wireless tests. A homemade testbench has been
designed for that purpose. As illustrated in Figure 3, it consists
of a linear wooden rail of 147 cm ending with a stopping
It shows that DoA is not observable for a single-antenna screw. A styrofoam stand holds antennas A and B which are
system with linearly drifting LOFO. Indeed, if we only con- cabled to the receiver. Those are separated by a distance d and
sider antenna A moving along a given x-axis, the phase of form an angle α with the direction of motion. The whole is
received packets is expressed in discrete-time as: placed on a wheeled stand to allow the system to freely move
  inside. The motion is initiated and maintained by hand using
cos(θ) a pulling rope before the collision with the stopping screw
φAk+1 = φ A
k + 2π f 0,k + v x,k T0
λ after 1.5 − 2 s. The transmitter is placed as far as possible
 
β1 cos(θ) ax,k inside the chamber such as the mean DoA should lay around
+ 2π + T02 (6)
2 λ 2 θ ≃ −90°. A 3G PPS with a period of T0 = 1 ms is used.
In total, 30 recordings have been performed. The transmission
with f0,k = β0 + β1 tk and λ the wavelength. Its linear
duration is 10s and the cart is left at standstill during 5s before
and quadratic terms embed both LOFO and kinematics phase
the movement is initiated. The DoA varies between −75° and
contributions and lead to an infinite number of solutions.
−98° by geometric calculations.
F. Estimator Regarding the equipment, both TX and RX were com-
posed of USRP E312 software-defined radios equipped with
Here we present the flow diagram of our DoA estimator. VERT900 antennas. The embedded MPU-9150 IMU is used
As shown in Figure 2, IMU and RX signal processings are for measuring accelerations and angular speeds along all 3
performed separately. Accelerations and angular velocities axes. A custom FPGA image has also been mounted on the
serve as input to an UKF to reconstruct the positions of both receiver node to implement the first stages of an LTE receiver,
antennas which are in turn given as input to the estimator. Two i.e. a correlator and a peak detector to detect the boundaries
different approaches are used for comparison: of the received packets. The FPGA then forwards the received
• Stop-and-Start (SaS) approach relies on on packets re- packets to the host software. IMU data and received packets
ceived at standstill (i.e. rss ) whose phase only contains are finally dumped into a data file for offline processing. Table
the contribution of the LOFO. The latter is first estimated, II summarizes experimental parameters.
 in such simple case, due to the lack of observability. The
B Rail Stopping dual-antenna system performs better with solutions closer to
RX x A 147 cm screw the ground truth i.e. θ = −87°. The most accurate results
are obtained with the JE algorithm with an RMSE of 6° (see
y
Table III). This can be attributed to the fact that SaS approach
Pulling estimates the LOFO at standstill. However, the LOFO can
Wheels
rope
θ significantly change between resting and moving phase for
375 cm 367 cm
low-quality oscillators, leading to larger estimation error. Table
N
III includes position and DoA estimation performances. An
TX average error of 10 cm is obtained in the movement direction
which confirms the importance of maintaining trajectories
E
short for an unaided inertial navigation system [7].

1
0.9
0.8
0.7
Fig. 3. Top view of the experimental setup in anechoic chamber. 0.6

F(x)
0.5
0.4
0.3 SaS : Dual-ant.
TABLE II 0.2 JE : Single-ant.
E XPERIMENTAL PARAMETERS 0.1 JE : Dual-ant.
0
DoA -90° Carrier frequency fc 1.9 GHz

0
20
40
60
80
0
0
0
0
40
20
00

0
0
0
-8
-6
-4
-2

10
12
14
-1
-1
-1
T0 1 ms λ 15.8 cm
Timu 5 ms d 5 cm (°)
α −30◦ Sampling frequency fs 614.4 kHz
Fig. 5. Experimental CDFs - single-frame processing - Comparison between
single vs. dual-antenna system and SaS vs. Joint approach. Ground truth at
−87° is highlighted in dashed green.
IV. M EASUREMENT R ESULTS
A. Single-frame processing
TABLE III
One can demonstrate that far-field assumptions are not E XPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCES - F ULL PROCESSING
satisfied in given scenario. Therefore, packets have been
selected within a frame in the middle of the movement such IMU DoA estimation
that the size of the virtual array is D = 50 cm to satisfies processing
those assumptions. The mean trajectory in the EN plane local x local y Single˙ant. Dual-ant. Dual-ant.
JE SaS JE
computed on the 30 experiments is displayed in Figure 4 for Mean 0.04 m 1.37 m Mean 1° -80° -92°
both antennas, testifying the time growing positioning error distance
Distance 0.04 m 0.1 m RMSE 123° 8° 6°
due to integration in dead-reckoning [8]. error

0.5
Antenna A
B. Batch processing
0.375
0.25
Antenna B In this section, packets have been divided into 3 different
Target
batches for DoA estimation: at the beginning, in the middle
North (m)

0.125
0 and at the end of the movement. Each batch relies in a
-0.125 frame such that traveled distances are equal to previously i.e.
-0.25 D = 50 cm. Figure 6 shows the CDFs in case of dual-antenna
-0.375
system using JE approach. In this case, each batch belongs to
-0.5
0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 1.25 1.5 its ground truth. It can be seen that, most of the time, solutions
East (m) are closed to real DoA but that another solution is obtained
around 30° in 20% of cases at most. Indeed, if received packets
Fig. 4. Global mean trajectories of dual-antenna array in EN plane. Colored phase at antenna B is expressed as a function of the one at A:
areas highlight the ±3σ intervals. Final 3σ-error ellipses are also displayed.
2πd
φB = φA −
cos(θ − α) (7)
Several cumulative density functions (CDF) including the λ
30 experiments are displayed in Figure 5 to compare both with α the angle the array makes w.r.t to y-axis. Since
approaches but mostly the dual-antenna system regarding the α = −30°, it is straightforward that both DoA provide the
single-antenna one. One can notice that the single-antenna exact same value for cos(θ − α). Finally, results also show
configuration has difficulty in providing a clear solution, even the increasing DoA magnitude along the cart’s trajectory (see
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DoA estimation
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Ground Truth -81° -86° -92°
Mean -90° -92° -95°
RMSE 9° 6° 4°
V. C ONCLUSION
A. Observability and performances of dual-antenna arrays
This paper investigates the ability of dual-antenna receiver
for performing virtual DoA estimation jointly with the use
of low-quality oscillators with significant drifting LOFO and
trajectories of the order of a meter. A DoA estimation model
is provided, accounting for dual-antenna receivers and LOFO
that has linear drift over time. We present fully-wireless
experiment considering basic rectilinear trajectory. The exper-
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single-antenna receivers and are able to raise the lack of
observability, allowing near-uniqueness of the solution for 1D
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