Aperiodic geometry design for DOA estimation using compressive sensing

Antenna arrays used in compressive sensing based DOA estimation algorithms are generated randomly to minimize mutual coherence. This scheme suffers from practical limitations. For an antenna array that is sufficiently random, some elements of the array would almost always fall very close to each other, which is not practicable. Rectangular arrays, although very uniform and practicable, suffer from poor performance when used in compressive sensing algorithms that assume spatial sparsity. Aperiodic arrays seem to offer a compromise solution. This paper demonstrates that it is possible to design aperiodic antenna array by using a simple disturbance optimization scheme, that can be applied to multiple aperiodic array geometries. The optimization scheme uses a few parameters to generate an aperiodic geometry. We will also see that the optimized aperiodic array has better performance than several other geometries studied in this paper and performs very close to random array configuration.