Antenna Array Signal Direction of Arrival Estimation on Digital Signal Processor (DSP)

Antenna arrays are used in many digital signal processing applications due to their ability to locate signal sources. Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation is a key task of array signal processing. Although various algorithms have been developed for DOA estimation, their high complexity prevents their use in real-time applications. In this paper, we design and develop an efficient parallel implementation of DOA on DSP which is the most widely used processor in embedded system. Due to the potential parallelism in MUSIC algorithm, it is selected for 2-D DOA estimation. Two computational cores in MUSIC are identified and parallelized. Vectorization of multiple single precision floating point operations is proposed to make good use of the 128-bit vectors on DSP C6678. Then, the parallel DOA estimation algorithm is implemented on one core of DSP C6678 which is the latest version up to now. Experiments are conducted on both 1-D and 2-D antenna array signals. Considerable performance improvement is obtained.