Generalized Coprime Array Configurations for Direction-of-Arrival Estimation

A coprime array uses two uniform linear subarrays to construct an effective difference coarray with certain desirable characteristics, such as a high number of degrees-of-freedom for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. In this paper, we generalize the coprime array concept with two operations. The first operation is through the compression of the inter-element spacing of one subarray and the resulting structure treats the existing variations of coprime array configurations as well as the nested array structure as its special cases. The second operation exploits two displaced subarrays, and the resulting coprime array structure allows the minimum inter-element spacing to be much larger than the typical half-wavelength requirement, making them useful in applications where a small interelement spacing is infeasible. The performance of the generalized coarray structures is evaluated using their difference coarray equivalence. In particular, we derive the analytical expressions for the coarray aperture, the achievable number of unique lags, and the maximum number of consecutive lags for quantitative evaluation, comparison, and design of coprime arrays. The usefulness of these results is demonstrated using examples applied for DOA estimations utilizing both subspace-based and sparse signal reconstruction techniques.