Direction-of-Arrival Estimation in Coprime Array Using the ESPRIT-Based Method.

Zhen Meng,Weidong Zhou

doi:10.3390/s19030707

Abstract

Coprime arrays have shown potential advantages for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation by increasing the number of degrees-of-freedom in the difference coarray domain with fewer physical sensors. In this paper, a new DOA estimation algorithm for coprime array based on the estimation of signal parameter via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) is proposed. We firstly derive the observation vector of the virtual uniform linear array but the covariance matrix of this observation vector is rank-deficient. Different from the traditional Toeplitz matrix reconstruction method using the observation vector, we propose a modified Toeplitz matrix reconstruction method using any non-zero row of the covariance matrix in the virtual uniform linear array. It can be proved in theory that the reconstructed Toeplitz covariance matrix has full rank. Therefore, the improved ESPRIT method can be used for DOA estimation without peak searching. Finally, the closed-form solution for DOA estimation in coprime array is obtained. Compared to the traditional coprime multiple signal classification (MUSIC) methods, the proposed method circumvents the use of spatial smoothing technique, which usually results in performance degradation and heavy computational burden. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by numerical examples.

Highlights

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation plays a vital role in radar, sonar, wireless communications, remote sensing and other engineering applications [1,2,3,4,5]
Compared to the traditional coprime multiple signal classification (MUSIC) methods, the proposed method circumvents the use of spatial smoothing technique, which usually results in performance degradation and heavy computational burden
In order to fully employ the DOFs contained in coprime array for DOA estimation, a novel method in [35] vectorizes the coprime array covariance matrix to formulate a larger virtual uniform linear array (ULA) with widened aperture

Summary

Introduction

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation plays a vital role in radar, sonar, wireless communications, remote sensing and other engineering applications [1,2,3,4,5]. In order to fully employ the DOFs contained in coprime array for DOA estimation, a novel method in [35] vectorizes the coprime array covariance matrix to formulate a larger virtual ULA with widened aperture. We have proposed a novel DOA estimation algorithm in the coprime array by using the ESPRIT-based method. Due to the avoidance of the spatial smoothing technique in the traditional coprime MUSIC methods, the available DOFs can be fully utilized and the computational complexity can be greatly reduced. Because of increased DOF in the coprime coarray, the proposed method can proposed method can detect more DOA than the ULA with the same number of sensors.

Problem

Proposed Coprime Array DOA Estimation Method

Simulation Results

Method

Conclusions