Triad-Displaced ULAs Configuration for Non-Circular Sources with Larger Continuous Virtual Aperture and Enhanced Degrees of Freedom

Abstract

Non-uniform linear array (NULA) configurations are well renowned due to their structural ability for providing increased degrees of freedom (DOF) and wider array aperture than uniform linear arrays (ULAs). These characteristics play a significant role in improving the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation accuracy. However, most of the existing NULA geometries are primarily applicable to circular sources (CSs), while they limitedly improve the DOF and continuous virtual aperture for non-circular sources (NCSs). Toward this purpose, we present a triad-displaced ULAs (Tdis-ULAs) configuration for NCS. The Tdis-ULAs structure generally consists of three ULAs, which are appropriately placed. The proposed antenna array approach fully exploits the non-circular characteristics of the sources. Given the same number of elements, the Tdis-ULAs design achieves more DOF and larger hole-free co-array aperture than its sparse array competitors. Advantageously, the number of uniform DOF, optimal distribution of elements among the ULAs, and precise element positions are uniquely determined by the closed-form expressions. Moreover, the proposed array also produces a filled resulting co-array. Numerical simulations are conducted to show the performance advantages of the proposed Tdis-ULAs configuration over its counterpart designs.