The performance of a direction-finding system is significantly degraded by the imperfection of an array. In this paper, the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem is investigated in the uniform linear array (ULA) system with the unknown mutual coupling (MC) effect. The system model with MC effect is formulated. Then, by exploiting the signal sparsity in the spatial domain, a compressed-sensing (CS)-based system model is proposed with the MC coefficients, and the problem of DOA estimation is converted into that of a sparse reconstruction. To solve the reconstruction problem efficiently, a novel DOA estimation method, named sparse-based DOA estimation with unknown MC effect (SDMC), is proposed, where both the sparse signal and the MC coefficients are estimated iteratively. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve better performance of DOA estimation in the scenario with MC effect than the state-of-the-art methods, and improve the DOA estimation performance about 31.64 % by reducing the MC effect by about 4 dB.
Design and Simulation of Metamaterial based Circularly Polarized Antenna Array