Signal Correlation Modeling in Acoustic Vector Sensor Arrays

A vector sensor measures the scalar and vector components of the acoustic field. In a multipath channel, the sensor collects the information via multiple paths. Depending on the angle-of-arrival distribution and other channel characteristics, different types of correlation appear in a vector sensor array, which affect the array performance. In this paper, a novel statistical framework is developed which provides closed-form parametric expressions for signal correlations in vector sensor arrays. Such correlation expressions serve as useful tools for system design and performance analysis of vector sensor signal processing algorithms. They can also be used to estimate some important physical parameters of the channel such as angle spreads, mean angle of arrivals, etc.