Efficient DOA Estimation Under Partially Impaired Antenna Array Elements

Abstract

Partially impaired antenna array is one of the challenges for estimating the accurate directions of the signals impinging upon antenna arrays. It causes random loss of the signal information, resulting in the poor direction of arrival (DOA) estimation performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient DOA estimation method under partially impaired antenna array elements, which work randomly. We first devise a strategy to detect the positions of randomly lost signal information corresponding to partially impaired antenna array elements and then formulate the problem of received signal recovery as low rank matrix completion. Afterwards, we utilize the recursive least squares (RLS) with the nulling antenna array for DOA estimation due to its fast convergence and low mean square error properties and place the nulls in the directions of received signals by adjusting the weight vectors adaptively. The reciprocal of the antenna array defines the output spatial spectrum, and the directions of the signals are estimated by finding the high peaks. We also investigate the mean and mean square performance of the RLS after <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">recovering</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">de-noising</i> the received signal. Simulation results show that the proposed method converges to optimal solution fast and outperforms the existing DOA estimation methods.