A novel array structure for directions-of-arrival estimation with increased degrees of freedom

A novel array structure for significantly increasing the degrees of freedom of linear arrays is proposed. This structure is obtained by systematically nesting two or more uniform linear arrays and can provide O(N²) degrees of freedom using only O(N) physical sensors. It is possible to provide closed form expressions for the sensor locations and the exact degrees of freedom obtainable from the proposed array as a function of the total number of sensors. This cannot be done for existing classes of arrays like minimum redundancy arrays which have been used earlier for detecting more sources than sensors. A novel spatial smoothing based technique is also proposed to exploit the increased degrees of freedom offered by the array to perform DOA estimation of more sources than sensors, using only second order statistics of the received data. This method does not suffer from inherent weaknesses of techniques employing higher order statistics or quasi stationarity of sources. The validity of all the proposed methods is verified through numerical examples.