Direction-of-Arrival Estimation of Coherent Signals for Uniform Linear Antenna Arrays With Mutual Coupling in Unknown Nonuniform Noise

We recently proposed a direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method for the coexistence of uncorrelated and coherent signals, which is related to the uniform linear antenna arrays with mutual coupling (MC) in the presence of unknown nonuniform noise. This technique, however, relies on the assumption of mixed signals and is not suitable for scenarios with purely coherent signals. This paper extends the mixed signal scenario to the purely coherent signals one on one hand, and on the other hand, allows us to directly adopt the ESPPRIT algorithm to perform DOA estimation in MC environments. To be specific, with the help of the least squares (LS) criterion, the nonuniform noise is first eliminated, and the traditional middle subarray scheme can then be employed to be immune to the influence of MC. Unlike the former operation, following a different line of attack the latter can make full use of the whole array and provide a larger array antenna aperture. Furthermore, we derive a new strategy to directly determine the DOAs without taking MC into account and performing spectral search. This brings substantial benefits to the DOA estimation accuracy and computational cost. The superiority of the proposed approaches is verified by numerical examples.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a DOA estimation method for uniform linear antenna arrays with mutual coupling in the presence of unknown nonuniform noise. The method can handle both mixed and purely coherent signal scenarios. It eliminates nonuniform noise using the least squares criterion and adopts a middle subarray scheme to mitigate the influence of mutual coupling. Moreover, it derives a new strategy to directly determine DOAs without considering mutual coupling and performing spectral search, which improves the estimation accuracy and computational cost.