Gridless DOA Estimation Algorithm for Strictly Noncircular Sources under Unknown Mutual Coupling

In this paper, the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in the scenario where a uniform linear array is impinged by the strictly non-circular sources with the unknown mutual coupling is considered. An extended signal vector is generated by concatenating the received array data and its conjugate counterpart. Then a new clean steering vector is obtained based on the banded symmetric Toeplitz structure of the mutual coupling matrix. Further, atomic norms associated with the array structure are generated and its equivalent semidefinite programming is used to solve this atomic norm minimization problem. Simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness of the propose algorithm.

I. Introduction

The effect of mutual coupling is mainly embodied in the interference of array manifolds. With the development of compressed sensing (CS) theory [1], [2], the algorithms based on sparse representation recovery (SRR) have been successfully applied to the DOA estimation. For the SRR-based algorithms dealing with DOA estimation under mutual coupling, they can be further divided into three subcategories: on-grid DOA estimation method [3], off-grid DOA estimation method [4] and gridless DOA estimation method [5].