DOA estimation in MIMO radar with broken sensors by difference co-array processing

We consider the problem of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar taking into account a possibility that some sensors are broken. In this case, the DOA estimation suffers from performance degradation. Motivated by the fact that the MIMO structure and difference co-array (MIMO-DC) processing can be used jointly and it comes with an advantage that the virtual antenna elements can occupy the positions of the broken sensors and has more degrees of freedom (DOFs), we propose a novel method to overcome the problem of broken sensors. We also show that the proposed method can obtain more DOFs to resolve more sources, and the virtual antenna elements can occupy the positions of broken sensors.