Due to its widespread application in communications, radar, etc., the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal has become increasingly urgent in the field of localization. Under uniform circular array (UCA) and near-field conditions, this paper presents a closed-form algorithm based on phase difference for estimating the three-dimensional (3-D) location (azimuth angle, elevation angle, and range) of the OFDM signal. In the algorithm, considering that it is difficult to distinguish the frequency of the OFDM signal's subcarriers and the phase-based method is always affected by errors of the frequency estimation, this paper employs sparse representation (SR) to obtain the super-resolution frequencies and the corresponding phases of subcarriers. Further, as the phase differences of the adjacent sensors including azimuth angle, elevation angle and range parameters can be expressed as indefinite equations, the near-field OFDM signal's 3-D location is obtained by employing the least square method, where the phase differences are based on the average of the estimated subcarriers. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by several simulations.
Keywords: near-field OFDM signal; parameter estimation; phase difference; sparse representation (SR); uniform circular array (UCA).