Simplified Estimation of 2D DOA for Coherently Distributed Sources

Abstract

In mobile communications, local scattering in the vicinity of the mobile results in angular spreading as seen from a base station antenna array. In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the two-dimensional (azimuth and elevation) direction-of-arrival (DOA) parameters of spatially distributed sources. Based on double parallel uniform linear arrays (ULAs), a simplified method without spectrum-peak searching is proposed for the 2D DOA estimation of multiple coherently distributed (CD) sources. The proposed method firstly obtains two approximate rotational invariance relations with respect to the nominal DOAs of CD sources by using one-order Taylor approximation to the generalized steering vectors (GSVs) of two pairs of shifted subarrays. And then a new ESPRIT-based method is utilized to estimate the nominal azimuth DOA and nominal elevation DOA. In addition, a simple parameter matching approach is also given. Compared with the conventional methods, our method has significantly reduced the computational cost and can sustain the estimation performance within a tolerable level. Moreover, our method is a blind estimator without any prior knowledge about angular distribution shape. Numerical examples illustrate the performance of the method.