Abstract
This paper presents a physical frequency-diverse multimode lens-loaded cavity, designed and used for the purpose of the direction of arrival (DoA) estimation in millimetre-wave frequency bands for 5G and beyond. The multi-mode mechanism is realized using an electrically-large cavity, generating spatio-temporally incoherent radiation masks leveraging the frequency-diversity principle. It has been shown for the first time that by placing a spherical constant dielectric lens (constant-ϵ(r)) in front of the radiating aperture of the cavity, the spatial incoherence of the radiation modes can be enhanced. The lens-loaded cavity requires only a single lens and output port, making the hardware development much simpler and cost-effective compared to conventional DoA estimators where multiple antennas and receivers are classically required. Using the lens-loaded architecture, an increase of up to 6 dB is achieved in the peak gain of the synthesized quasi-random sampling bases from the frequency-diverse cavity. Despite the fact that the practical frequency-diverse cavity uses a limited subset of quasi-orthogonal modes below the upper bound limit of the number of theoretical modes, it is shown that the proposed lens-loaded cavity is capable of accurate DoA estimation. This is achieved thanks to the sufficient orthogonality of the leveraged modes and to the presence of the spherical constant-ϵ(r) lens which increases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the received signal. Experimental results are shown to verify the proposed approach.