Spatial smoothing is a pre-processing technique and is a prerequisite to be able to perform accurate direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of coherent sources if subspace-based DOA methods are employed. In this work, a large-scale 5G uniform linear array (ULA) of sixty elements is considered. Signals from five sources, which are uniformly separated in space by an angle of 2°, impinge upon the array. The first two sources are coherent to each other whereas the rest are uncorrelated. Root-MUSIC and ESPRIT were considered for analysis. MATLAB simulations reinforce the fact that spatial smoothing enables the array to accurately estimate coherent sources. The root mean square error (RMSE) between the true and estimated DOAs was used as a measure of performance. RMSE decreased with an increase in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), array size, and separation between the DOAs. ESPRIT was faster than Root-MUSIC in execution, and therefore, its output was fed, as an input, to the Least Mean square (LMS) null steering algorithm to achieve smart antenna functionality. The aperture lost due to spatial smoothing is negligible in 5G arrays since it accounts only for a small fraction of the array’s total aperture. © IAEME Publication Scopus Indexed.