A Distribution Fitting Approach for Localization of Multiple Scattered Sources with Very Large Arrays

In this paper, a distribution fitting approach is proposed to estimate the angular parameters of multiple incoherently distributed sources with large antenna arrays. The estimator utilizes the approximate orthogonality of the array response vectors of large arrays to obtain a vector which is the superposition of the probability distributions of the direction-of-arrivals (DOAs) of the sources. Then, the angular parameters can be estimated by fitting distribution functions to this vector successively. Hence, the complexity of the proposed approach is much lower than that of other well-known estimators which require the fitting of a matrix. Analysis and numerical results show that the proposed estimator can achieve better performance than other estimators.