On source association of DOA estimation under multipath propagation

For direction of arrival (DOA) estimation under a multipath environment, algorithms exist to estimate the DOAs of all paths associated with different sources, by employing various schemes to cope with coherent signals induced by multipath. Most of these methods do not provide any information on which source a detected path belongs to, i.e., source association. However, information on source association is useful for identifying, locating, and tracking the sources. In this letter, we propose a novel method to associate all paths to each source based on the assumption that the DOAs of all paths have been detected by an existing method. The description of our source association algorithm and the simulation are based on wideband cyclostationary signals. However, our algorithm can be easily modified to work for both stationary signals and narrowband cyclostationary signals.