Biquaternion-based DOA estimation of noncircular signals with time-modulated antenna arrays

Abstract

A novel direction of arrival (DOA) estimation method of noncircular signals based on biquaternion with time-modulated antenna arrays is proposed in this paper. Time-modulated antenna arrays (TMAA) is introduced into the DOA estimation of noncircular signals for the first time, which makes the receiver only need a single RF processing channel, which effectively saves hardware resources. The noncircular features of the signal are fully exploited for virtual array expansion with the biquaternion framework. Aiming at the problem of nonuniform noise in the array output after time modulation, the nonuniform noise correction is realized by using the theoretical analysis of the time sequence scheme. The simulation illustrates that the proposed method has superior performance than conventional DOA estimation method with TMAA, in terms of resolution and numbers of localizable sources.