Symmetric Double-Supplemented Nested Array for Passive Localization of Mixed Near-Field and Far-Field Sources

Abstract

In mixed-field source localization, the physical properties of a sensor array, such as the degrees of freedom (DOFs), aperture, and coupling leakage, directly affect the accuracy of estimating the direction of arrival (DOA). Compared to conventional symmetric uniform linear arrays, symmetric non-uniform linear arrays (SNLAs) have a greater advantage in mixed-field source localization due to their larger aperture and higher DOF. However, current SNLAs require improvements in their physical properties through modifications to the array structure in order to achieve more accurate source localization estimates. Therefore, this study proposes a symmetric double-supplemented nested array (SDSNA), which translates nested subarrays based on symmetric nested arrays to increase the aperture and inserts two symmetric supplemented subarrays to fill the holes created by the translation. This method results in longer consecutive difference coarray lags and larger apertures. The SDSNA is compared to existing advanced SNLAs in terms of their physical properties and DOA estimation. The results show that, with the same number of sensors, the SDSNA has a higher DOF, a larger aperture, and smaller coupling, indicating the advantages of the SDSNA in terms of its physical properties. Under the same experimental conditions, the SDSNA has a lower root-mean-square error of source location, thus indicating better performance in terms of both DOA and distance estimation.