High-resolution Direction of Arrival Estimation Method Based on Sparse Arrays with Minimum Number of Elements

Abstract

Regular fully filled antenna arrays have been widely used in direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. However, practical implementation of these arrays is rather complex and their resolutions are limited to the beamwidth of the array pattern. Therefore, higher resolution and simpler methods are desirable. In this paper, the compressed sensing method is first applied to an initial fully filled array to randomly select the most prominent and effective elements which are used to form the sparse array. To keep the dimension of the sparse array equal to that of the fully filled array, the first and the last elements were excluded from the sparseness process. In addition, some constraints on the sparse spectrum are applied to increase estimation accuracy. The optimization problem is then solved iteratively using the iterative reweighted l1 norm. Finally, a simple searching algorithm is used to detect peaks in the spectrum solution that correspond to the directions of the arriving signals. Compared with the existing scanned beam methods, such as the minimum variance distortion-less response (MVDR) technique, and with subspace approaches, such as multiple signal classification (MUSIC) and ESPIRT algorithms, the proposed sparse array method offers better performance even with a lower number of array elements and in severely noisy environments. Effectiveness of the proposed sparse array method is verified via computer simulations.