Detection of the Number of Signals with Fewer Sensors than Sources

Masashi TSUJI  Kenta UMEBAYASHI  Yasuo SUZUKI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E96-B   No.9   pp.2235-2243
Publication Date: 2013/09/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E96.B.2235
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Antennas and Propagation
Keyword: 
detection of the number of signals,  nested arrays,  degrees of freedom,  DOA estimation,  array signal processing,  

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Summary: 
In this paper, a method is introduced that can detect the number of incident signals (NIS) even there are fewer antennas than NIS. Previous works on NIS detection methods assumed that the number of antennas always exceeded NIS. In the DOA estimation field, the DOA estimation is possible, even if NIS exceeds the number of antennas, by extending the degrees of freedom of array (DOFA) using a modified array configuration, such as a nested array (NA). The information of NIS is required in advance to accurately estimate DOA, however, it has not been investigated deeply when NIS is larger than the number of antennas. In this paper, a NIS detection method based on the DOFA extending process using NA is proposed. One of the important issues in NIS detection is the detection metric. As one of the simple metrics, the ratio of adjacent eigenvalues (RAE) has been used. However, the direct application of RAE may not achieve adequate NIS detection performance. Therefore, we propose a metric based on the modified ratio of adjacent eigenvalues (MRAE) avoids the issue of RAE. Numerical results show that the metric based on MRAE can achieve proper NIS detection performance even if NIS is larger than the number of antennas.