Exploration on 2D DOA estimation of linear array motion: Uniform linear motion

Abstract

Generally, due to the limitation of the dimension of the array aperture, linear arrays cannot achieve two-dimensional (2D) direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. But the emergence of array motion provides a chance for that. In this paper, a generalized motion scheme and a novel method of 2D DOA estimation are proposed by exploring the linear array motion. To be specific, the linear arrays are controlled to move along an arbitrary direction at a constant velocity and snap per fixed time delay. All the received signals are processed to synthesize the comprehensive observation vector for an extended 2D virtual aperture. Subsequently, since most of 2D DOA estimation methods are not universal to our proposed motion scheme and the reduced-dimensional (RD) method fails to handle the case of the coupled parameters, a decoupled reduced-complexity multiple signals classification (DRC MUSIC) algorithm is designed specifically. Simulation results demonstrate that: a) our proposed scheme can achieve underdetermined 2D DOA estimation just by the linear arrays; b) our designed DRC MUSIC algorithm has the good properties of high accuracy and low complexity; c) our proposed motion scheme with the DRC method has better universality in the motion direction.