Sparse vector sensor array design based on quaternionic formulations

In sparse arrays, the randomness of sensor locations avoids the introduction of grating lobes, while allowing adjacent sensor spacings to be greater than half a wavelength, leading to a larger array size with a relatively small number of sensors. In this paper, for the first time, the design of both robust and non-robust sparse vector sensor arrays is studied, and the proposed method is based on quaternionic formulations. It is a further extension of the recently proposed compressive sensing (CS) based design for traditional sparse arrays and the vector sensors being considered are crossed-dipoles. Design examples are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.