Successive DSPE-based coherently distributed sources parameters estimation for unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with antennas array

Abstract

In electronic countermeasures and reconnaissance, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has played a more and more significant role. Usually when UAV conducts low altitude reconnaissance, due to the complicated environment, the reflected signals of the same source through different propagation paths will produce multipath signals. In this paper, we construct the received multipath signals of UAV with antennas array as coherently distributed (CD) sources model and propose a successive distributed signal parameter estimation (S-DSPE) algorithm to estimate its nominal direction of arrival (DOA) and angular spread. The proposed algorithm simplifies two-dimensional (2D) spectral peak searching within the conventional DSPE algorithm to one-dimensional spectral peak searching, which remarkably reduces the computational complexity of conventional DSPE algorithm. Furthermore, the parameters estimation performance of the proposed algorithm is close to the conventional DSPE algorithm, and outperforms the estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPIRT) algorithm and propagator method (PM). The simulations results verify the usefulness of the proposed algorithm.