Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2024, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (1): 81-93.doi: 10.23919/JSEE.2022.000128

• ELECTRONICS TECHNOLOGY • Previous Articles    

Triad-displaced ULAs configuration for non-circular sources with larger continuous virtual aperture and enhanced degrees of freedom

Abdul Hayee SHAIKH(), Xiaoyu DANG(), Daqing HUANG()   

  1. 1 College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 211106, China
  • Received:2021-09-22 Accepted:2022-06-27 Online:2024-02-18 Published:2024-03-05
  • Contact: Abdul Hayee SHAIKH E-mail:shaikhhayee@yahoo.com;dang@nuaa.edu.cn;857337053@qq.com
  • About author:
    SHAIKH Abdul Hayee was born in 1990. He received his M.E. degree in computer and information engineering in 2016. He is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree in communication and information systems at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His research interests include array signal processing and wireless communications technology. E-mail: shaikhhayee@yahoo.com

    DANG Xiaoyu was born in 1973. He received his Ph.D. degree from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA, in 2009. Then, he joined College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He has received more than 10 research grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and other central government agencies. His research interests include wireless network and signal processing with application to aeronautical and astronautical communications. E-mail: dang@nuaa.edu.cn

    HUANG Daqing was born in 1959. He is with the College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His research interests include telemetry of UAVs and other related telecommunication systems. E-mail: 857337053@qq.com
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62031017;61971221) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (NP2020104)

Abstract:

Non-uniform linear array (NULA) configurations are well renowned due to their structural ability for providing increased degrees of freedom (DOF) and wider array aperture than uniform linear arrays (ULAs). These characteristics play a significant role in improving the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation accuracy. However, most of the existing NULA geometries are primarily applicable to circular sources (CSs), while they limitedly improve the DOF and continuous virtual aperture for non-circular sources (NCSs). Toward this purpose, we present a triad-displaced ULAs (Tdis-ULAs) configuration for NCS. The Tdis-ULAs structure generally consists of three ULAs, which are appropriately placed. The proposed antenna array approach fully exploits the non-circular characteristics of the sources. Given the same number of elements, the Tdis-ULAs design achieves more DOF and larger hole-free co-array aperture than its sparse array competitors. Advantageously, the number of uniform DOF, optimal distribution of elements among the ULAs, and precise element positions are uniquely determined by the closed-form expressions. Moreover, the proposed array also produces a filled resulting co-array. Numerical simulations are conducted to show the performance advantages of the proposed Tdis-ULAs configuration over its counterpart designs.

Key words: direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, sparse array, non-circular source (NCS), sum co-array, difference co-array, degrees of freedom (DOF)