A Robust Phase-Ambiguity-Immune DOA Estimation Scheme for Antenna Array

A direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation scheme that is immune to phase ambiguity is proposed for directional uniform circular array in the context of software defined radio based engineering implementation, where phase calibration is often required in multi-channel receiver for high-resolution, multi-source DOA estimation algorithms to work. The proposed scheme makes use of sparse signal representation technique, and is robust in the sense that no phase calibration is required when implemented by multi-channel receiver and can achieve multi-source DOA estimation when single-channel receiver is used. To facilitate the performance evaluation, a Cramer-Rao lower bound to the proposed estimation scheme is derived. Implemented by l(1)-regularized least squares program, the feasibility of the proposed scheme is validated via simulations.