Direction Finding With Sparse Subarrays: Design, Algorithms, and Analysis

This article proposes design techniques for partially calibrated sparse linear subarrays and algorithms to perform direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. First, we introduce array architectures that incorporate two distinct array categories, namely type-I and type-II arrays. The former breaks down a known sparse linear geometry into as many pieces as we need, and the latter employs each subarray such as it fits a preplanned sparse linear geometry. Moreover, we devise two DOA estimation algorithms that are suitable for partially calibrated array scenarios within the coarray domain. The algorithms are capable of estimating a greater number of sources than the number of available physical sensors, while maintaining the hardware and computational complexity within practical limits for real-time implementation. To this end, we exploit the intersection of projections onto affine spaces by devising the generalized coarray multiple signal classification (GCA-MUSIC) in conjunction with the estimation of a refined projection matrix related to the noise subspace, as proposed in the GCA root-MUSIC algorithm. An analysis is performed for the devised subarray configurations in terms of Degrees of Freedom, as well as the computation of the Cramér-Rao lower bound for the utilized data model, in order to demonstrate the good performance of the proposed methods. Simulations assess the performance of the proposed design methods and algorithms against existing approaches.