Phase-Independent Beamspace MUSIC Algorithm for a Single Port Phased Antenna Array

The paper is dedicated to Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple sources using a single port phased antenna array. We consider the case of the received signal with randomly varying phase that may be caused by both hardware constraints and waveform design. The well-known subspace-based algorithms such as Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) show good performance with digital antenna arrays but they cannot be applied under the mentioned restrictions. Moreover, the existing beamspace approaches intended for phased antenna arrays cannot also be applied because of the phase variation. In this paper we propose a novel phase-independent beamspace MUSIC algorithm that uses the spatial power spectrum measured with a finite number of beams as the input. It builds an approximation of the signal covariance matrix and applies the MUSIC’s approach for DOA estimation. The simulation results shows that the developed algorithm has a superresolution ability and allows one to distinguish a weak source masked by the sidelobe power leakage of the stronger one.