Effect of Sparse Array Geometry on Estimation of Co-array Signal Subspace

Abstract

This paper considers the effect of sparse array geometry on the co-array signal subspace estimation error for Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) estimation. The second largest singular value of the signal covariance matrix plays an important role in controlling the distance between the true subspace and its estimate. For a special case of two closely-spaced sources impinging on the array, we explicitly compute the second largest singular value of the signal covariance matrix and show that it can be significantly larger for a nested array when compared against a uniform linear array with same number of sensors.