Generalized coprime array configurations

A coprime array consists of two uniform linear subarrays that construct an effective difference co-array with certain desirable characteristics. In this paper, we propose a generalized coprime array concept through the compression of the interelement spacing of one constituting subarray. As such, the existing variations of coprime array and nested array structures are represented as special cases. The achievable unique lags as well as consecutive lags in the resulting virtual array are analytically expressed, and the direction-of-arrival estimation performance is examined using both the MUSIC algorithm and sparse signal reconstruction techniques.