Joint DOA and frequency estimation with sub-Nyquist sampling

Abstract

In this paper, to jointly estimate the frequency and the direction-of-arrival(DOA) of the narrowband far-field signals, a novel array receiver architecture is presented by the concept of the sub-Nyquist sampling techniques. In particular, our contribution is threefold. i) First, we propose a time-space union signal reception model for receiving array signals, where the sub-Nyquist sampling techniques and arbitrary array geometries are employed to decrease the time-domain sampling rate and improve the DOA estimation accuracy. A better joint estimation is obtained in the higher time-space union space. ii) Second, two joint estimation algorithms are proposed for the receiving model. One is based on a trilinear decomposition from the third-order tensor theory and the other is based on subspace decomposition. iii) Third, we derive the corresponding Cram\'er\text{-}Rao Bound (CRB) for frequency and DOA estimates. In the case of the branch number of our architecture is equal to the reduction factor of the sampling rate, it is observed that the CRB is robust in terms of the number of signals, while the CRB based on the Nyquist sampling scheme will increase with respect to the number of signals. In addition, the new steer vectors of the union time-space model are completely uncorrelated under the limited number of sensors, which improves the estimation performance. Furthermore, the simulation results demonstrate that our estimates via the receiver architecture associated with the proposed algorithms closely match the CRB according to the noise levels, the branch number and the source number as well.