An Effective Method of Joint DOA-delay Estimation for Coherent Space-Time Distributed Signals

In this paper, an effective method based on propagator method (PM) is proposed to jointly estimate the directions of arrival (DOA) and the propagation delays of a wireless multipath channel, using a uniform linear array. The proposed method builds the spatial propagator by the channel estimation matrix to estimate the center DOA and angular spread by constructing two-dimensional (2D) searching spatial spectrum. Similarly, we can build the time-delay propagator by the channel estimation matrix to estimate the center time-delay and delay spread by constructing two-dimensional (2D) searching delay spectrum. Compared with some existing techniques, our approach doesn´t need eigenvalue decomposition of the sample covariance matrix and requires a much lower computational complexity. The computer simulation shows that the proposed methods can effectively estimate the coherent distributed source of space-time parameters, restrain the influence of distribution extension and has good performance.