Performance analysis of spatial smoothing with interpolated arrays

The interpolated spatial smoothing algorithm is a computationally efficient method for estimating the directions of arrival (DOAs) of signals, some of which may be perfectly correlated. It extends the spatial smoothing method to arbitrary array geometries. A statistical performance analysis of the algorithm is presented. Closed-form expressions for the covariance matrix of the DOA estimation errors are derived using a perturbation analysis. Evaluating these expressions for specific cases and comparing them to the Cramer-Rao lower bound for the DOA estimates provides insight into the statistical efficiency of this algorithm. The formulas for the error covariance are quite general and can be specialized to provide results for other DOA estimation algorithms as well