An Efficient DOA Estimation Method for Passive Surveillance System Based on Troposcatter

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation plays an important role in the passive surveillance system based on troposcatter. Rank deficiency and subspace leakage resulting from multipath propagation can deteriorate the performance of the DOA estimator. In this paper, characteristics of signals propagated by troposcatter are analyzed, and an efficient DOA estimation method is proposed. According to our new method, the invariance property of noise subspace (IPNS) is introduced as the main method. To provide precise noise subspace for INPS, forward and backward spatial smoothing (FBSS) is carried out to overcome rank deficiency. Subspace leakage is eliminated by a two-step scheme, and this process can also largely reduce the computational load of INPS. Numerical simulation results validate that our method has not only good resolution in condition of closely spaced signals but also superior performance in case of power difference.