Analysis of a tripole array for polarization and direction of arrival estimation

In this paper we evaluate the performance of a tripole array for estimation of the polarization and one dimensional direction of arrival (DOA). We employ a model based on far-field calculations of a tripole antenna and completely polarized electromagnetic waves carrying Gaussian distributed signals. The analysis of the performance is based on calculations of the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the polarization and DOA estimators. It is seen that the tripole array is suitable for polarization estimation with or without knowledge of the DOA. It is also seen that the quality of the DOA estimate depends strongly on the polarization state.