Echo Signal Enhancement for ESPRIT to Estimate Angles of Arrival by Virtually Overlapped Subarray Decomposition in ADAS Radar Systems

Angle of arrival (AoA) for target echo signal detection is crucial in vehicular radar systems, where the estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance (ESPRIT) provides a high-resolution estimation. A subarray decomposition strategy is presented in this article to create two ESPRIT antenna arrays with enhanced echo signal strengths, applicable to multi-input–multioutput (MIMO) operations for creating a large virtual array. The concept intends to maximize the echo signal’s strength with minimum signal interferences by increasing the aperture sizes of the two ESPRIT antenna arrays. The decomposition produces two virtually overlapped subarrays to increase the subarray aperture sizes in the spatial or spectral representations. It is applied to the MIMO-based arrays for two-way radiation patterns for ESPRIT estimation of AoA. Numerical simulation examples are shown to validate the feasibility and demonstrate the applications.