Computationally Effective Direction of Arrival for Nested Array without the Number of Signal Sources

Abstract

In this paper, we link the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) with spatial smoothing method for the problem of direction of arrival(DOA) estimation with nested arrays and proposed a neoteric algorithm. The existing algorithms with nested arrays based on spatial smoothing method are effective, but essentially suffer from searching peaks being in whole sector. To solve the problem above, we first vectorize the covariance matrix of the received signal to acquire the observation vector that behaves like an extended received signal of a much longer array. We second exploit DFT method to achieve the coarse initial DOA estimates. Finally, according to the spatial smoothing MUSIC algorithm, we acquire the angle estimation by peak searching around the coarse initial DOA estimates. Simulation results validate the superiority of the proposed method in DOA estimation performance, as compared to the existing spatial smoothing MUSIC algorithm with nested array.