FPGA Hardware Implementation and Experimental Verification of Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Algorithm using LU Decomposition

[Nizartayem]

**DETAILED CASE STUDY AND APPLICATION NOTES IN ATTACHED PDF**

Company: 

Texas A&M University-Commerce,USA
Author(s): 

Dr. Nizar Tayem, Assistant professor, Engineering and Technology, Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University-Commerce

Ahmed Hussain, Lecturer and Lab Coordinator, College of Electrical Engineering, Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University

Dr. Soliman Abdel-Hamid, Associate Professor in Telecommunications and Signal Processing, Staffordshire University

NI Product(s) Used: 

Signal generator (NI PXIe-5652) RF down-converter (PXIe- 5601), digitizer (PXIe-5622) modules, FPGA Virtex-5 (PXIe 7965), LabVIEW software and LabVIEW FPGA module

Industry: 

Wireless Communications and Signal Processing 

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Application Area:

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation, Source localization, beamforming, radars, Massive MIMO system for 5G application, Sonar, Biomedical

Challenge:

Implement a computationally intensive DOA estimation algorithm in FPGA that estimates the DOA angles in the fastest possible time and utilizes least amount of hardware resources, and experimentally verify its performance and estimation accuracy.

Solution:

Utilize NI hardware, LabVIEW software, and LabVIEW FPGA high throughput modules to design and build a complete hardware prototype for real-time DOA estimation that can be used to experimentally validate the performance of the proposed DOA estimation algorithm based on LU decomposition. A uniform linear array of 4 antenna elements is deployed at the receiver which is connected to the PXI modules.

 NI PXI hardware platform provides communication modules for RF signal acquisition, downconversion, and digitization, FlexRIO for FPGA implementation of the DOA estimation algorithm using LabVIEW FPGA modules.