Direction finding of coherent sources with nonlinear arrays

This paper presents an approach to estimate the directions-of-arrival (DOAs) of narrowband coherent (completely corrected) signals by an arbitrary geometry sensor array. The concept of focussing matrices is introduced to estimate the outputs of a virtual uniform linear array from the outputs of the real array in order to use spatial smoothing techniques. Unlike the work presented in [5], the proposed approach avoids multiple singular value decomposition (SVD) computations in the various sectors because it is not necessary to divide the field of view of the array into sectors. Simulation results are given to support the approach.On leave from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, People's Republic of China.