In this paper, a sparse array design problem for non-Gaussian signal direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is investigated. Compared with conventional second-order cumulant- (SOC-) based methods, fourth-order cumulant- (FOC-) based methods achieve improved DOA estimation performance by utilizing all information from received non-Gaussian sources. Considering the virtual sensor location of vectorized FOC-based methods can be calculated from the second order difference coarray of sum coarray (2-DCSC) of physical sensors, it is important to devise a sparse array design principle to obtain extended degree of freedom (DOF). Based on the properties of unfolded coprime linear array (UCLA), we formulate the sparse array design problem as a global postage-stamp problem (GPSP) and then present an array design method from GPSP perspective. Specifically, for vectorized FOC-based methods, we divide the process of obtaining physical sensor location into two steps; the first step is to obtain the two consecutive second order sum coarrays (2-SC), which can be modeled as GPSP, and the solutions to GPSP can also be utilized to determine the physical sensor location sets without interelement spacing coefficients. The second step is to adjust the physical sensor sets by multiplying the appropriate coprime coefficients, which is determined by the structure of UCLA. In addition, the 2-DCSC can be calculated from physical sensors directly, and the properties of UCLA are given to confirm the degree of freedom (DOF) of the proposed geometry. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed array geometry.
Sparse Array Design Exploiting the Augmented Conjugate Correlation Statistics for DOA Estimation
