Improved Direction Finding Accuracy for A Limited Number of Antenna Elements with Harmonic Characteristic Analysis

Abstract

A direction-finding approach for arrays with a limited number of antenna elements has been investigated. A method based on the harmonic analysis of the received signal has been proposed to solve it. The angle estimation accuracy has been improved by angle searching and peak detection. The proposed method is theoretically described and numerical simulations are provided to verify its effectiveness. Compared with classical direction-finding methods with limited antenna elements, significant improvements have been demonstrated.

A Novel Approach to Unambiguous Doppler Beam Sharpening for Forward-Looking MIMO Radar

“…6, the simulation was tested under different forward speeds. The angle profile of higher speed has a narrower main lobe and lower sidelobe ratio compared with lower speed, showing the resolution and performance of angle estimation will improve by increasing the speed, which is consistence with (19).…”

“…MIMO radar technology exploits the spatial diversity of transmit and receive antenna arrays, thus providing an improved angle resolution with a limited number of antennas. Many direction of arrival (DOA) methods have been developed to gain resolution in the angular domain via signal processing, including minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) [12], subspace-based methods such as multiple signal classification (MUSIC) [13], [14], and estimation of signal parameters via rational invariance techniques (ESPRITs) [15], sparse sensing-based approaches [16], the iterative adaptive approach (IAA) [17], [18], and harmonic analysis [19], [20]. However, the obtained angular resolution is still insufficient, limited by the physical azimuth beam width and the computational complexity of some of these methods.…”