A beamspace approach for 2-D localization of incoherently distributed sources in massive MIMO systems

• Beamspace.
• Uniform cylindrical array (UCyA).
• Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO).
• Direction-of-arrivals (DOAs).
• Low complexity.

In this paper, a generalized low-complexity beamspace approach is proposed for two-dimensional localization of incoherently distributed sources with a uniform cylindrical array (UCyA) in large scale/massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The received signal vectors in the antenna-element space are transformed into the beamspace by employing beamforming vectors. As a beneficial result, the total dimensions of the received signal vectors are significantly reduced. In addition, it is shown that the error introduced by the transformation decreases as the number of UCyA antennas increases. The UCyA is composed of multiple uniform circular arrays (UCAs), and the beamspace array response matrices of adjacent UCAs are linearly related. Then, the linear relation is exploited to estimate the nominal elevation direction-of-arrivals (DOAs) directly and the nominal azimuth DOAs based on a low-complexity search algorithm. In contrast, the linear relation in the traditional approach is based on approximations and the associated search algorithm is more complicated. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the existing approach in terms of both performance and complexity in the context of massive MIMO systems.