Mode space smoothing algorithm to estimate DOA of coherent signals impinging on uniform circular array

Abstract

A novel method to estimate DOA of coherent signals impinging on a uniform circular array(UCA) is presented in this paper. A virtual uniform linear array (VULA) is first derived by using spatial DFT technique, transforming the UCA from element space to phase mode space to obtain the properties of ordinary ULA, and then the well known spatial smoothing technique is applied to the VULA so that the lost rank of covariance matrix due to signal coherence can be retrieved. This method makes it feasible to use the simple MUSIC algorithm to estimate DOA of coherent signals impinging on a UCA without heavy computation burden. Simulation results strongly verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.

The DOA and polarization estimation of coherent signals via UCA-IEVS

“…Ref. [10] transformed the circular array into a virtual linear array through the mode space transformation, and then realized the spatial spectrum estimation of coherent sources using the spatial smoothing method. However, this method lose the effective aperture of the array, resulting in low utilization of the data received by the array.…”