DIRECTION OF ARRIVAL ESTIMATION BASED ON HETEROGENEOUS ARRAY

Traditionally, the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation usually employs homogeneous antenna arrays consisting of many identical antennas. This paper proposes a new technique of DOA estimation by using a heterogeneous array which has many elements with each element pointing to a different direction from others. A general expression of the manifold for planar heterogeneous array is derived. Then, a polarized MUSIC (Pol-MUSIC) method for unknown polarizations is proposed. One advantage of this Pol-MUSIC method is that it can obtain the DOA of signals with any unknown polarizations while no search of the polarizations is required. The proposed method is verified by simulation, and its performance is analyzed. The heterogeneous array is a polarization-sensitive array though it has one channel at each point of spatial sampling. This provides favorable conditions for simplifying the systems.