Two-dimensional Direction Finding Based on Cylindrical Nested Conformal Array
Mingcheng Fu, Zhi Zheng, Wen-Qin Wang · IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems · 2023
Recently, nested conformal arrays have attracted considerable interest due to their ability of providing increased array aperture and enhanced degrees of freedom compared to uniform conformal arrays. In this paper, we address the problem of two-dimensional (2-D) direction finding using cylindrical nested conformal array (CNCA). First of all, we derive the coarray signal model of the CNCA, and utilize different coarray signal components to construct multiple Toeplitz matrices. Based on the constructed Toeplitz matrices, we further develop two direction finding algorithms to achieve the decoupled estimation of 2-D direction. Unlike the exiting approaches, the proposed two algorithms exploit more coarray output components, and hence they have better direction finding performance. Moreover, our algorithms can be applied to a larger number of nested subarrays in the CNCA. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithms in comparison to the exiting methods.