Two Dimensional Direction of Arrival Estimation using Single Snapshot of Nonuniformly Spaced Planar Array

Direction of arrival estimation (DoA) is one of the most demanding problems which one has to solve for localizing and tracking multiple rapidly moving targets as in radar, mobile communication and in other areas. In this paper, an approach is presented for two dimensional direction of arrival (2D-DoA) estimation using a single snapshot of the voltages measured at nonuniformly spaced omnidirectional isotropic point sources in a planar array. This is very useful to reach a real time or near to real time situation .The array elements are placed on a plane and arranged either exponentially or sinusoidally. The voltages induced in the antenna elements due to all signals impinging on the planar array at a particular instance of time are preprocessed by applying a transformation matrix to the measured snapshot of voltages. This electromagnetic preprocessing technique is used to compensate for the lack of nonuniformity in a planar array. Through this interpolation technique we perform 2D-DoA estimation using a modified Matrix Pencil technique. Limited numerical examples are presented to illustrate the performance and accuracy of the proposed method.