Arrival angle estimation in non-Gaussian noise

This paper considers the problem of estimating the direction of arrival of plane waves from sensor array data. It is shown through a multivariate generalization of Whittle´s inequality that the least squares estimator and its subspace-based approximations are inefficient when the noise distribution is non-Gaussian. In order to improve efficiency, two computationally elegant extensions of the MUSIC algorithm are suggested. Computer simulations indicate that the proposed methods perform much better than MUSIC for non-Gaussian noise, while the performances of all the three methods are comparable for Gaussian noise