Broadband direction of arrival estimation via spatial co-prime sampling and polynomial matrix methods

Direction of arrival estimation is a crucial aspect of many active and passive systems, including radar and electronic warfare applications. Spread spectrum modulation schemes are becoming ever more common in both Radar and Communications systems. Because such modulation spreads the signal energy in frequency and time, such sources prompt the need for new approaches for detection and location. Broadband antennas and their subsequent signal processing systems are expensive in terms of both cost and power consumption. This forces a limitation on the number of elements in a feasible real-world array. In this paper a novel co-prime broadband MUSIC based direction of arrival algorithm is presented. The main feature of the new method is that it aims to reduce the number of antenna elements for a given aperture by utilising a coprime sensing scheme applied to the problem of broadband direction finding via the polynomial MUSIC algorithm. Comparative results using simulated data show that the proposed co-prime polynomial MUSIC has comparable performance to those obtained using a uniform linear array method with an equivalent physical aperture