Symmetric thinned coprime array with reduced mutual coupling for mixed near‐field and far‐field sources localization

Abstract

As we all know, the non-uniform array is widely used in the mixed near-field (NF) and far-field sources localization. The nested array contains a uniform linear array, it is easy to be affected by mutual coupling, so we propose a symmetric thinned coprime array (STCA) to reduce the mutual coupling effect of mixed source localization. In this paper, the STCA configuration consists of two sparse uniform linear arrays, the first subarray is composed of 2N − 1 sensors, and the sensor element spacing is Md. The second subarray is composed of 2 M + 2 ⌊ M 2 ⌋ sensors, and the sensor element spacing are Nd and Md respectively. The two subarrays form the symmetric coprime array, which shares a reference sensor. Under the same number of physical array sensors, compared with the latest symmetric nested array, although STCA has lower consecutive lags, the array sensors have larger inter-sensor spacing and larger physical array aperture, which can significantly reduce the mutual coupling effect between physical sensors, and better estimation performance of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation can be achieved. Finally, simulation results show that STCA can achieve better performance than other symmetric nested arrays under the same array sensors and mutual coupling effects.