Single Sensor to Estimate DOA with Programmable Metasurface

With small sampling length, a novel direction of arrival (DOA) estimation method based on a single programmable metasurface sensor is proposed in this paper. Serving as a physical random sampling receiver, a dynamic metasurface generates series of random radiation patterns to sense the incident signals, which is subsequently processed by the compressive sensing orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm to recover the DOA information. Mathematical model of DOA estimation is firstly built for theoretical analyses. Furthermore, numerical simulations are investigated with extensive performance analyses. In comparison with metasuface-based beam-scanning method, metasurface-based compressive sensing for DOA estimation has superior performance with smaller sampling length. Finally, a proof-of-concept experiment is made to verify the feasibility of programmable metasurface for DOA estimation. rgb0.00,0.00,0.00Compared to other traditional estimation techniques that require multiple channels, the programmable metasurface can achieve estimation with only a single channel and small sampling length.