A Low-Complexity Algorithm for Coherent DOA Estimation in Monostatic MIMO Radar

This paper investigates the topic of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for coherent sources in monostatic multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar, and proposes a low-complexity algorithm for coherent DOA estimation. The direction vector of MIMO radar can be firstly mapped into a vector of virtual uniform linear array (ULA), and after that, a linear operator is constructed by partial cross-correlations from the received data of the virtual ULA. Finally, the DOAs can be obtained via roots finding method based on this linear operator. The DOAs can be estimated without any eigen-decomposition, nor evaluating all correlations of the received data. The proposed algorithm has much lower complexity as well as much better angle estimation performance than conventional forward backward spatial smoothing (FBSS)-propagator method (FBSS-PM), FBSS- estimation method of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (FBSS-ESPRIT), FBSS- root multiple signal classification (FBSS-Root MUSIC), and ESPRIT-like algorithm. Simulations present the effectiveness and improvement of our approach.