A novel high degree of freedom sparse array with displaced multistage cascade subarrays

The coprime array is a recently developed sparse array that is widely used in direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. The degree of freedom (DOF) for existing coprime arrays relies on the virtual array model, which is limited to the array structure. Furthermore, the continuous virtual array aperture is restricted. This paper aims to propose a novel high DOF sparse array with displaced multistage cascade subarrays to further increase the length of the continuous virtual array and improve the DOF. Through cascading and separating the same sparse arrays, the continuous virtual array aperture is improved and the accuracy of the direction-of-arrival estimation is increased. It is proved that the range of the displaced distance for the maximized continuous virtual array can be obtained. The comparison between the array configuration presented in this paper and the existing common arrays are analyzed. The simulation experiments show that, compared with the uniform array, the coprime array, the nested array, and the coprime array with displaced subarrays (CADiS), the sparse array configuration proposed in this paper can significantly increase the aperture of the continuous virtual array, greatly improve the array DOF and the DOA estimation accuracy, and effectively estimate the DOA of multiple sources in underdetermined conditions.