Optimization of element positions for direction finding with sparse arrays

Sparse arrays are attractive for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation since they can provide accurate estimates at a low cost. A problem of great interest in this matter is to determine the element positions that yield the best DOA estimation performance. A major difficulty with this problem is to define a suitable performance measure to optimize. A novel criterion is proposed for optimizing element positions. The ambiguity threshold of the Weiss-Weinstein bound (1985) is used to optimize the element positions of a sparse linear array. The array obtained from the optimization is compared with some other sparse array structures that have been proposed in the literature