Large Array Antenna Aperture for GNSS Applications
Noori BniLam, Fabio Principe, Paolo Crosta
Abstract
In this article, we propose a systematic procedure that exploits the available antennas to achieve a large array antenna aperture. The proposed procedure utilizes the coarray concept to provide a large virtual array antenna, thus achieving a high beamforming gain and a high spatial resolution. The procedure also employs an Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) evaluation step in order to detect the array antenna phase ambiguity, which might occur due to the random nature of the selected antennas' distribution. The procedure is generic and application agnostic; however, we have adopted here the Global Navigation Satellite System. The performance of every selected array antenna has been analyzed, theoretically, using the Cramer–Rao Lower Bound calculations. In addition, simulation and experimental analyses have also been performed to verify the performance of the selected array antennas. All the provided analyses show that the selected array antennas, using the proposed procedure, outperform the traditional planar array antennas.