Sparse cylindrical sensor network with beamforming and DoA estimation

In this paper, different sensor network deployment schemes are studied based on the structures of co-prime cylindrical array, nested cylindrical array and sparse cylindrical array. According to the characteristic of cylindrical array, it can be seen as a linear array whose elements are the identical circular arrays, which motivates us to apply such structures for sensor network deployment. In our sensor networks with circular-array deployment, the co-prime linear array and nested linear array could be combined with circular arrays. Moreover, in order to achieve better performance in direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation with as few elements as possible, the two-dimensional nested array is extended to the cylindrical array and through augmented matrix MUSIC approach, multiple sources in the range could be successfully detected based on such deployed sensor networks. Simulation results show that the new proposed sparse cylindrical arrays-based sensor networks can not only reduce the number of sensors, but also improve the resolution in comparison with an equal length uniform cylindrical array-based sensor networks.