Direction of Arrival Estimation with Sparse Subarrays
This work addresses array processing challenges in signal processing for applications like radar or communications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing coarray and MUSIC methods.
The paper tackles direction-of-arrival estimation by proposing sparse linear subarray designs and algorithms for partially-calibrated arrays, achieving the ability to estimate more sources than physical sensors while maintaining practical hardware and computational limits.
This paper proposes design techniques for partially-calibrated sparse linear subarrays and algorithms to perform direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. First, we introduce array architectures that incorporate two distinct array categories, namely type-I and type-II arrays. The former breaks down a known sparse linear geometry into as many pieces as we need, and the latter employs each subarray such as it fits a preplanned sparse linear geometry. Moreover, we devise two Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation algorithms that are suitable for partially-calibrated array scenarios within the coarray domain. The algorithms are capable of estimating a greater number of sources than the number of available physical sensors, while maintaining the hardware and computational complexity within practical limits for real-time implementation. To this end, we exploit the intersection of projections onto affine spaces by devising the Generalized Coarray Multiple Signal Classification (GCA-MUSIC) in conjunction with the estimation of a refined projection matrix related to the noise subspace, as proposed in the GCA root-MUSIC algorithm. An analysis is performed for the devised subarray configurations in terms of degrees of freedom, as well as the computation of the Cramèr-Rao Lower Bound for the utilized data model, in order to demonstrate the good performance of the proposed methods. Simulations assess the performance of the proposed design methods and algorithms against existing approaches.