Asymptotic Performance Analysis of Maximum Likelihood Algorithm for Direction-of-Arrival Estimation: Explicit Expression of Estimation Error and Mean Square Error

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method to get explicit expressions of some quantities associated with performance analysis of the maximum likelihood DOA algorithm in the presence of an additive Gaussian noise on the antenna elements. The motivation of the paper is to make a quantitative analysis of the ML DOA algorithm in the case of multiple incident signals. We present a simple method to derive a closed-form expression of the MSE of the DOA estimate based on the Taylor series expansion. Based on the Taylor series expansion and approximation, we get explicit expressions of the MSEs of estimates of azimuth angles of all incident signals. The validity of the derived expressions is shown by comparing the analytic results with the simulation results.

Keywords

• maximum likelihood (ML)
• angle-of-arrival (AOA)
• uniform linear array (ULA)
• approximation