Direction of arrival

In signal processing literature, direction of arrival denotes the direction from which usually a propagating wave arrives at a point, where usually a set of sensors are located. These set of sensors forms what is called a sensor array. Often there is the associated technique of beamforming which is estimating the signal from a given direction. Various engineering problems addressed in the associated literature are:

• Find the direction relative to the array where the sound source is located.
• Direction of different sound sources around you are also located by you using a process similar to those used by the algorithms in the literature.
• Radio telescopes use these techniques to look at a certain location in the sky.
• Recently beamforming has also been used in RF applications such as wireless communication. Compared with the spatial diversity techniques, beamforming is preferred in terms of complexity. On the other hand beamforming in general has much lower data rates. In multiple access channels (CDMA, FDMA, TDMA), beamforming is necessary and sufficient.
• Various techniques for calculating the direction of arrival, such as Angle of Arrival (AoA), Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA), Frequency Difference of Arrival (FDOA), or other similar associated techniques.