A Two-Dimensional DOA Estimation Method Based on Virtual Extension of Sparse Array

The interelement spacing of a coprime array breaks through the half-wavelength limitation, so that a larger array aperture can be obtained with a fixed number of array elements. In this paper, the symmetry of the noncircular signal is used to virtually expand the L-shaped array into an orthogonal cross array. Furthermore, the virtual received signal of the augmented array is obtained by the second-order statistic of the received data. Decoupling and dimension reduction of elevation and azimuth are realized by a z-axis subarray and y-axis subarray. Finally, the sparse reconstruction of the signal is realized by the minimum absolute convergence and selection operator method. This method can enlarge the aperture and freedom of array and has higher accuracy and resolution of DOA estimation. It has the advantages of automatic parameter pairing without additional pairing operation and is effective for coherent and incoherent signals. The final numerical simulation results prove the effectiveness of the method in this paper.

DOA and Noncircular Phase Estimation of Noncircular Signal via an Improved Noncircular Rotational Invariance Propagator Method

We consider the computationally efficient direction-of-arrival (DOA) and noncircular (NC) phase estimation problem of noncircular signal for uniform linear array. The key idea is to apply the noncircular propagator method (NC-PM) which does not require eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) of the covariance matrix or singular value decomposition (SVD) of the received data. Noncircular rotational invariance propagator method (NC-RI-PM) avoids spectral peak searching in PM and can obtain the closed-form solution of DOA, so it has lower computational complexity. Animproved NC-RI-PMalgorithm of noncircular signal for uniform linear array is proposed to estimate the elevation angles and noncircular phases with automatic pairing. We reconstruct the extended array output by combining the array output and its conjugated counterpart. Our algorithm fully uses the extended array elements in the improved propagator matrix to estimate the elevation angles and noncircular phases by utilizing the rotational invariance property between subarrays. Compared with NC-RI-PM, the proposed algorithm has better angle estimation performance and much lower computational load. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is analyzed. We also derive the variance of estimation error and Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) of noncircular signal for uniform linear array. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.