DOA estimation for sparse nested MIMO radar with velocity receive sensor array

Abstract

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for sparse nested MIMO radar with velocity receive sensor array is studied, and an algorithm based on extended unitary root multiple signal classification (MUSIC) is proposed. The nested MIMO radar utilizes sparse transmit array and velocity receive array with nested inter-element distances, which can make the final virtual array to be a long and sparse velocity sensor array. After exploiting unitary transformation to transform the data into real-valued one, an extended root MUSIC based method is developed to decompose the angle estimation into high-resolution but ambiguous and low-resolution but unambiguous DOA estimations, which are automatically paired. Thereafter, the ambiguous estimation is used to recover all possible DOAs, and the unambiguous DOA estimation is used as a reference to resolve the estimation ambiguity problem. Compared to conventional methods, the proposed algorithm requires no peak search, maintains larger aperture and achieves better DOA estimation performance. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of our approach.