Compressive Sensing Techniques Applied to a Semi-Circular mmWave MIMO Array

This paper addresses the experimental evaluation of compressive sensing (CS) based direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation using a millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) semi-circular array. The hardware design provides a highly randomized virtual array, making it well suited for use with CS. In addition, other commonly used array topologies are compared to the hardware implementation using numerical simulations. Comparing the different topologies, it is shown that CS works better in combination with a pseudo-random virtual array than with uniform arrays. Moreover, the better performance of the CS approach paired with a semi-circular topology compared to conventional beamforming (BF) is demonstrated by the higher dynamic range in the angular spectrum.