Single Sensor to Estimate DOA With Programmable Metasurface

With the small sampling length, a novel Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) estimation method based on a single programmable metasurface sensor is proposed in this article. 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 (CS) orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm to recover the DOA information. A mathematical model of DOA estimation is first built for theoretical analyses. Furthermore, numerical simulations are investigated with extensive performance analyses. In comparison with the metasuface-based beam-scanning method, metasurface-based CS for DOA estimation has superior performance with a smaller sampling length. Finally, a proof-of-concept experiment is made to verify the feasibility of the programmable metasurface for DOA estimation. Compared to other traditional estimation techniques that require multiple channels, the programmable metasurface can achieve estimation with only a single channel and small sampling length.